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RADHA WELT VATSAL,Ph.D.
35-55 80th Street, Apt 2, Jackson
Heights, NY 11372 • Phone: (718) 205-1990 • rwv@cinemaindia.us
Radha Welt Vatsal is a film curator, film historian
and filmmaker. She is director
of Cinema India!
an organization that promotes and
exhibits quality Indian cinema in the United States .
Cinema
India! began in as a
monthly film series at the American Museum
of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY), and
quickly expanded to a touring program in 2003.
The
Cinema
India!tm 2003 Film Tour is currently underway at:
·
The American
Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY)
·
The Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston,
MA)
·
The Gene
Siskel Film Center at the Art
Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL) as Five From India
·
The Walker
Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)
as Inside India
The tour
includes award-winning and undiscovered work by established and emerging
filmmakers, and ranges from Bollywood extravaganzas, to contemplative art
films, challenging documentaries, and off-beat independent productions.
Radha
has also worked with New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT), and
was the Festival Director for NYWIFT's 25th Anniversary film
festival, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New
York, NY). This
week-long event, "25 Years of Women Calling the Shots" (2003),
included industry panels, and screenings presenting the best of women's film,
TV, and documentary production in New York over the
past 25 years.
In
2000, Radha curated "Actress-Directors of the Silent Screen," at
the American Museum of the Moving
Image. The series featured archival
prints of films by Mabel Normand, Nell Shipman, Helen Gardener and a special
appearance by Frederica Maas, a 100-year-old screenwriter who worked during
the silent era.
Born
and raised in Bombay, India, Radha
came to the US in 1989 as a scholarship
student at the Taft School (Watertown,
CT). She then
received a Morehead Scholarship to attended the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she received
her B.A. (1995).
Radha
completed her doctorate in film history from Duke University
in 2003. Her academic focus is
on silent-era women filmmakers.
At Duke, Radha wrote and directed two short films, both of which
screened at various independent film festivals in the US. She was also coordinator of the Women
Film Pioneers Project, an inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional project
spearheading research on, and restoration and exhibition of films by silent
era-women filmmakers. Her essay
“Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era." was
published in A Feminist Reader in Early
Cinema, edited by Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra.
Radha
is currently organizing the Cinema India!
2004 National Film Tour which will bring an eclectic and discriminating
selection of Indian cinema to 8-10 cities in the United
States.
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