Ina Archer is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally including at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Maysles Cinema, New York; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. Archer was a studio artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow, and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and she has been awarded numerous residencies. She is a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the former co-chair of New York Women in Film & Television Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was on faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. She is a contributor to Film Comment magazine, as well as other film periodicals and three blogs (Continuum Film Blog, Black Leader, Ina’s Horror Blog). Archer received a BA in Film/Video from RISD and an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU focused on race, preservation, technology, and early sound film.
Film Restoration Can Turn the Lens Toward Marginalized Voices
Mining the metaphorical potential of Richard Sale’s Abandon Ship (1957), a film that addresses the moral conundrum of who to save in a lifeboat with a limited number of seats, Ina Archer looks at how digital technologies can help media archivists diversify the cinematic canon and, hopefully, spark “more equitable decisions about the fascinating moral dilemma of who gets to stay in the lifeboat.”