Meet the NYFF59 Team

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, with the 59th edition taking place September 24-October 10, 2021. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues a long-standing tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

NYFF59 Team

Eugene Hernandez, Director of NYFF
Dennis Lim, Director of Programming for NYFF
Matt Bolish, Producer of NYFF

Main Slate

Selection committee: Dennis Lim (chair), Eugene Hernandez, Florence Almozini, K. Austin Collins, Rachel Rosen

Currents

Selection committee: Dennis Lim (chair), Florence Almozini, Aily Nash, Tyler Wilson
Head shorts programmers: Aily Nash, Tyler Wilson
Programming assistants: Shelby Shaw, Madeline Whittle

Spotlight

Eugene Hernandez, Dennis Lim

Revivals

Florence Almozini, Dan Sullivan

Talks

Devika Girish and Madeline Whittle, in collaboration with Eugene Hernandez and Dennis Lim

NYFF Exhibition Manager

Manuel Santini

NYFF Programming Coordinator

Sofia Tate

NYFF Operations Coordinator

Erin Delaney

NYFF Advisors

Violeta Bava
Michelle Carey
Leo Goldsmith
Rachael Rakes
Gina Telaroli

NYFF Production Team

Kouros Alaghband,  Editing Coordinator
Albert Chow, Print Traffic Coordinator
Michael Dunn, Development Assistant
Marisa Frank, Industry Coordinator Consultant
Dominique Dejardin, Special Events Assistant
Doug Flint, Filmmaker Services Coordinator
Gwen Gilliam, Stage Manager
Danny Goldberg, Partnerships & Advertising Assistant
Jason Gutierrez, Filmmaker Services Coordinator
Joel Hoglund, Press Coordinator
April Lo, Production Supervisor
Erik Luers, Digital Marketing Assistant
Regina Riccitelli, Filmmaker Services Manager
Arin Sang-urai, Videography Coordinator
Sabrina Tenteromano, Volunteers Coordinator
Chris Torres, Operations Assistant
Maria Veliz, Marketing Assistant

Submissions Screeners

Mariana Sánchez Bueno
Almudena Escobar López
Vikram Murthi
Manny Lage-Valera
Maxwell Paparella
Marius Hrdy

NYFF is produced by Film at Lincoln Center. See a complete overview of the staff and board here.

About the 59th New York Film Festival Programming Team

(Pictured above, L-R: Dennis Lim, Eugene Hernandez, Florence Almozini, K. Austin Collins, Rachel Rosen, Devika Girish, Aily Nash, Dan Sullivan, Madeline Whittle, Tyler Wilson, Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, Gina Telaroli)

  • Florence Almozini is currently Senior Programmer at Large for Film at Lincoln Center, where she serves on the committees for the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and oversees the programming of new releases. She has organized numerous retrospectives at FLC, including Walerian Borowczyk (2015), Anna Magnani (2016), Marcello Mastroianni (2017), Jiri Trnka (2018), Luchino Visconti (2018), The Female Gaze: Contemporary Women Cinematographers (2018), Agnès Varda (2019), and Wong Kar-wai (2020). As the Director of BAMcinématek, where she worked from 1999 to 2013, she presented retrospectives of Hong Sang-soo (2003), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2005), Manoel de Oliveira (2008), Arnaud Desplechin (2009), Nicolas Winding Refn (2009), Bong Joon-ho (2009), and Andrzej Zulawski (2012). In 2009, she launched the venue’s first ever film festival, BAMcinemaFest, where she served as Festival Director. She has served on juries for the Mar del Plata and Tribeca Film Festivals, as well as the Cinema Tropical and IFP Gotham Awards, and has been on the selection committee for Tournées Film Festival since 2012. She was awarded the Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2013.
  • K. Austin Collins is the film critic for Rolling Stone. He was previously the film critic for Vanity Fair and The Ringer, and his other writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and the Brooklyn Rail. He writes crosswords for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the American Values Crossword Club. He lives in Brooklyn.
  • Devika Girish is the Co-Deputy Editor at Film Comment. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Reverse Shot, The New York Review of Books, Criterion, Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, and other publications. As a programmer, she has served on the selection committees of the Berlin Critics’ Week and the Mumbai Film Festival. Devika’s work has been recognized with a 2018 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award and a 2019 Southern California Journalism Award, among other honors.
  • Eugene Hernandez is Director of the New York Film Festival and Publisher of Film Comment at Film at Lincoln Center, where he serves as Deputy Executive Director. His duties include strategic leadership and managing emerging artist, industry, and education programs, as well as special events. He joined Film at Lincoln Center in 2010 as Director of Digital Strategy to develop digital platforms and content. In 1996, Hernandez co-founded IndieWire, which he built over 15 years as it became the leading editorial publication for independent and international films, filmmakers, industry, and audiences. He was named on Out magazine’s OUT100 list in 2015 and has served as a juror at Sundance, SXSW, and the Film Independent Spirit Awards and has worked extensively as a consultant for nonprofits including the Creative Capital Foundation, and written for major print and online publications. He is a member of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and currently serves on the board of advisors for SXSW, SeriesFest, and Art House Convergence, and works as a programming consultant for the Key West Film Festival.
  • Dennis Lim (Chair) has been the Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center since 2013. During his tenure, he has served on the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films selection committees, co-founded the Art of the Real festival, and organized numerous programs, including retrospectives of Jane Campion, George Cukor, Christian Petzold, Raúl Ruiz, Agnès Varda, and John Waters. He was previously the film editor of The Village Voice and the editorial director of the Museum of the Moving Image, and was the programmer of the 2010 Flaherty Film Seminar. He has served on multiple festival juries, including Sundance, Cannes Critics Week, Locarno, and San Sebastián, and as an advisor for the Berlinale, the Mumbai Film Festival, and the Thessaloniki Film Festival. In 2018 he received the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier of the Arts and Letters. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Film Comment, and taught film studies at Harvard and arts criticism at NYU. His 2015 book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place has been translated into three languages; his monograph on the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo will be published in 2022.
  • Aily Nash is a curator and educator based in New York. She is a programmer at the New York Film Festival, where she co-curated the Projections section from 2014–2019, and is currently head of short films and programmer for the Currents section. She is a program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She served as a Biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial and was Head of Programming for the 2018 Images Festival in Toronto. She curated the Basilica Screenings series at Basilica Hudson from 2012-2016. She has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1 (New York), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Anthology Film Archives (New York), SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), Doc’s Kingdom (Portugal), FACT (Liverpool), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (Tokyo), Ghost:2561 (Bangkok) and others. She has taught at CalArts, Dartmouth, and Bard Microcollege.
  • Rachel Rosen is a San Francisco Bay Area programmer and awards consultant. Previously, she was Director of Programming for SFFILM, which presents the annual San Francisco International Film Festival. She was Director of Programming for Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival for eight years. Rosen also served as Associate Director of Programming for the San Francisco International Festival. She has worked in various capacities for New York’s Film Forum and TriStar Pictures and served as Directors Liaison for three editions of the New York Film Festival. She is a graduate of Stanford University’s Master of Arts program in Documentary Film.
  • Dan Sullivan is an Assistant Programmer for Film at Lincoln Center. At FLC he has organized or co-organized retrospectives of Raúl Ruiz, David Lynch, Jacques Rivette, Germaine Dulac, Pedro Costa, Jane Birkin, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others, and various film series including “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam” (2017), “Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights” (2017), and “Make My Day: American Movies in the Age of Reagan” (2019, with J. Hoberman). He has also served as a programmer for NYFF and is currently a member of the New Directors/New Films selection committee.
  • Madeline Whittle has been a member of the year-round programming team at Film at Lincoln Center since 2016. Her writing on film appears regularly in Film Comment, and she has worked extensively as a freelance translator with a specialty in French film criticism. Her translation of Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond was published by BFI/Austrian Filmmuseum in 2016. In 2019 she served on the jury for the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
  • Tyler Wilson is an Assistant Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center. He has played a leading role in the organization’s shorts programming since 2017, serving on the selection committees for the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films. He is a co-programmer of FLC’s new releases and has co-organized numerous programs including International Melodrama (2017) and retrospectives of Jane Campion (2017), Jacques Tourneur (2018), Agnès Varda (2019), and Wong Kar-wai (2020). His writing has appeared in Film Comment and The Brooklyn Rail.

The 58th New York Film Festival Advisory Team:

  • Violeta Bava worked at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI) for 20 years, both as a programmer and the Co-Director of BAL, a leading co-production market for Latin American films. She has worked as a film consultant and production tutor for several funds, organizations, and festivals worldwide, and played a key role in the development of initiatives to support filmmakers and producers in the Latin American region. She was Professor of Cinema Aesthetics and Ethics at Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica (Buenos Aires) for more than 10 years. Since 2012, she has been the Latin American Consultant for the Venice International Film Festival and the Venice Market. She is also currently part of the selection committee at Visions du Réel, Head of Studies at the Torino FeatureLab, International Guest Curator at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and part of the programming team of the Macao International Film Festival. She is a founder of Ruda Cine, which has produced films by Milagros Mumenthaler, Martín Rejtman, Dominga Sotomayor, and Eduardo Williams. 
  • Michelle Carey is a Berlin-based film programmer. She is a member of the selection committee for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and is a Programmer for the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She was the artistic director of the Melbourne International Film Festival from 2011–18. She is film festivals editor for the online journal Senses of Cinema and a co-founder of the group Parenting at Film Festivals. She has served as Q&A moderator and been on juries for various festivals including the Berlinale Forum, Jeonju, Hong Kong, IFFR and Hamptons. In 2017 she was awarded a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. She previously worked for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the Adelaide Film Festival.
  • Leo Goldsmith is a teacher, writer, and curator based in New York. He is a visiting assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and has lectured on media and film at CUNY Brooklyn College, New York University, and Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), by Robert Stam with Richard Porton, and is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins (Verso Books). He has organized exhibitions and film programs with the Museum of the Moving Image, the Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, and CAC/Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania). He received his PhD from the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU in 2018.
  • Rachael Rakes is a curator, writer, editor, film programmer, and educator. She is currently Curator of Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, Netherlands, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Programmer at Large for Film at Lincoln Center, where she co-curates the annual festival Art of the Real. Recent exhibitions and programs include DECODERS/RECORDERS: Steffani Jemison and Samson Young (De Appel/Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam), Relational Capacities (Frame Contemporary/Amos Rex, Helsinki), On Watching Men (SAIC, Chicago), Dark Progress + Uncontained Energy and Contained Fear (Tabakerlara, San Sebastian), CAMP: In Cameras Res (De Appel), The Health Show II (A.I.R., NYC), In Between: Tacita Dean (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Rakes has taught on documentary aesthetics and socially engaged art at The New School and Harvard Summer School. She has advised for Sandberg Institute, and teaches a course on time-based essays at the New Centre for Research & Practice.
  • Gina Telaroli is a filmmaker, writer, and video archivist. From 2010-2020 she managed the video archive for Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions and consulted on and created the series trailer for “Martin Scorsese Presents: Republic Rediscovered,” a 30-film series celebrating the Poverty Row studio in conjunction with The Film Foundation, MoMA, and Paramount Pictures. Recently, she has published essays in two new books (Manny Farber: Paintings & Writings and The Sound of Fury: Hollywood’s Schwarze Liste) and programmed a series devoted to the Swedish documentarian Mikael Kristersson at the Museum of the Moving Image. In the last year, she recorded an extensive video interview for the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray/DVD release of Henry King’s The Gunfighter and published a chapter for the Pesaro Film Festival’s new eBook entitled Open Access Cinema. Her feature and short film work has been screened around the world. She is currently the Editorial Manager at MUBI’s Notebook and runs a Patreon alongside artist Carolyn Funk with original audio, artwork, and criticism.