Guests

PHOTO: You Nazty Spy! screening March 30 (before Address Unknown )

More guests to come…

Thomas Doherty
March 30 Address Unknown + You Nazty Spy!
Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University since 1990, is a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema who has also taught and lectured overseas as a Fulbright scholar. In 2005, he received recognition as an Academy Film Scholar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Doherty is the author of a bookshelf of outstanding books, including Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s; Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II; Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934; Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture; Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, and Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939; Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC & the Birth of the Blacklist. His most recent book is Little Lindy is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century.
Read more about Thomas Doherty.

Sara Hascal
March 24 Soda
Sara Hascal is Director of the Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture Program in the Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and the Assistant Director of the School of Hebrew at Middlebury College. She is a co-author of the widely used textbook Brandeis Modern Hebrew, published by Brandeis University Press. Dr. Hascal’s research focuses on the effect of using modern short Israeli plays to improve communication skills and cultural awareness for Hebrew language learners, and her teaching emphasizes Israeli culture and literature.

Claire Howard
March 23 The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival
Claire Howard is the Hansjörg Wyss Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prior to joining the MFA in September of last year, she was Associate Curator at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin. Her recently curated exhibitions at the Blanton include Long Live Surrealism! 1924–Today and Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi: Outside In. Howard earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Wellesley College. She has published widely on postwar Surrealism and its cultural contexts. (Photo credit: Manny Alcalá)

Jennifer Gunter King
March 2o Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Jennifer Gunter King is the Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Boston University, overseeing the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Digital Ventures, and the African Studies Library. Notable collections include the papers of Elie and Marion Wiesel, Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King joined BU in April 2024, after five years at Emory University, where she led the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. She previously directed the Hampshire College Library and the Archives and Special Collections at Mount Holyoke College. She holds a BA in history from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and an MA in history and MLS from the University of Maryland.

Karin Oehlenschlaeger
March 16 Riefenstahl
Karin Oehlenschläger is a cultural program curator at the Goethe-Institut Boston and has been curating the German Film Series at the Coolidge for thirteen years. She’s been with the Goethe-Institut since 2005 and is responsible for film, literature and political programs. She holds an MA in German Literature and Communications from Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Victoria Reed
March 23 Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief
Victoria Reed is the Sadler Senior Curator of Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has been conducting provenance research at the MFA since 2003. She is responsible for the research and documentation of the ownership history of the MFA’s encyclopedic collection, and in this role has overseen the resolution of numerous restitution claims. She has lectured and published extensively on provenance research, museum ethics, and art restitution. 

Lisa Rivo
Festival Co-Director
March 31 Breaking Home Ties + A Child of the Ghetto
Lisa Rivo is Co-Director of The National Center for Jewish Film. Founded in 1976, NCJF owns one of the world’s largest archives of Jewish-content films. The Center, which rescues, restores and makes available rare archival films, also distributes the work of contemporary filmmakers and has a dozen new films being produced under its aegis. She oversees the Center’s programmatic, distribution, curatorial and exhibition activities. Lisa has co-directed and co-curated 17 Boston-area film festivals and has curated other series worldwide. Ms. Rivo consults regularly with filmmakers, scholars, and curators, and has sat on numerous film festival juries. She has a degree in Art History from Vassar College and focused on American visual culture and film at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts PhD program. Lisa worked in the film program of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and as Director of Public Information at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Prior to joining NCJF in 2006, she was a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Associate Director & Senior Writer of the African American National Biography, an encyclopedia edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Sharon Pucker Rivo
Festival Co-Director
March 31 Breaking Home Ties + A Child of the Ghetto
Sharon Pucker Rivo, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The National Center for Jewish Film, has been a leading force in the field of Jewish film and culture for more than five decades through her work as a curator, programmer, archivist, film distributor, film and television producer, and academic. In the mid-1970s she and co-founder Miriam Krant rescued a languishing collection of Yiddish-language feature films. Today, NCJF is the largest archive of Jewish film outside of Israel, and a major distributor of restored classic and new independent Jewish-content films. Ms. Rivo was an early advocate for the inclusion of film in the study of history and culture and for the historically accurate use of visual materials. She has worked with hundreds of filmmakers around the world as a consultant and has appeared as an expert in many documentaries and television programs. She has curated film programs for venues from Boston to Beijing, including co-curating the first ever retrospective of Yiddish cinema, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ms. Rivo has been a member of Brandeis University faculty for more than thirty years and she lectures widely on the history of Jews in cinema, a field she helped pioneer. Internationally recognized as an authority on Jewish and Yiddish film, film archiving and restoration, and Jewish programming and distribution, she lectures and has served on numerous international film festival juries.

Oren Rudavsky
March 20 Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Director of Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, Oren Rudavsky is an award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow known for his documentary work, including Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, which premiered in 2019 and aired on PBS’s American Masters. His films, such as A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, Colliding Dreams, and Hiding and Seeking, often explore Jewish identity and history, and have been broadcast on PBS and screened at international festivals. Rudavsky also produced The Treatment, which won Best Film at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006, and he has contributed to national programming for PBS, ABC, and Bloomberg.

Andres Veiel
March 16 Riefenstahl
Director of Riefenstahl filmmaker Andres Veiel was born in 1959 in Stuttgart and studied Psychology in Berlin. After attending seminars in Directing and Dramaturgy at the Artist House Bethanien in Berlin, he has been active writing film and theater scripts and lectures at the Free University in Berlin. His films include the highly-acclaimed Black Box Germany (2001) which received the German Film Award for Best Documentary in 2002 and the European Film Award, Die Spielwütigen (2004), The Kick (2006), the feature If Not Us, Who (2011) which screened in Competition in Berlin, and the award-winning documentary Beus (2017). Veiel`s latest film Riefenstahl premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2024 went on to win the Guild Film Prize for Best Documentary and the Youth Jury Award at the Leipzig Film Art Fair. Veiel  is the recipient of more than 50 awards for his documentaries, fiction feature films, theater productions, and writing.