Alumni Lead Preservation Workshops in Albania

Three graduates of NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) MA Program in Tisch's Department of Cinema Studies led continuing education workshops for archive professionals in Tirana, Albania, in October 2016. Jonathan Farbowitz (MIAP '16), Andy Uhrich (MIAP '10), and Allie Whalen (MIAP '15) were part of an international group of 19 trainers sharing their expertise through the Archives in Motion (AIM) program, an intitiative of the Albanian Cinema Project (ACP).

Workshop attendees included students and professionals representing archival collections in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, FYRO Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Topics covered by MIAP alumni trainers included film handling and repair, 16mm and 35mm film projection, digital preservation, and quality control workflows.

Regina Longo founded the Albanian Cinema Project "to bring awareness, attention, and assistance to the plight of the Albanian National Film Archive." By forging partnerships across borders, ACP aims "to promote long-term preservation of the region's audiovisual heritage, and ongoing education for archives professionals" in the Western Balkans. This year's inaugural AIM workshops were designed to facilitate professional collaborations for "sharing information and best practices, while also ensuring [local archivists] continue to manage their own collections."

Jonathan Farbowitz is a media archivist whose interests include preserving malware and other digital anomalies, archiving media related to social movements, the treatment of footage of Indigenous peoples in archives, and developing open-source software. He has worked on collections at Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, and Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.

Andy Uhrich is the Film Archivist, Assistant Librarian at Indiana University (IU) Libraries Moving Image Archive. He is a former member of the Center for Home Movies Board of Directors, and he serves on the board of the Northwest Chicago Film Society. He is pursuing his PhD at IU and also teaches there.

Allie Whalen is an audiovisual archivist who specializes in the preservation of international, independent media. She is a Sound Preservation Engineer at the UNC Southern Folklife Collection. Her work includes the preservation of underground, activist, and community collections with projects at UCLA Preservation Program, Anthology Film Archives, Democracy Now, Czech National Film Archive, Cinemateca Uruguaya, Museo del Cine, and Señal 3 Televisión Comunitaria.