Richard Peña has been the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival since 1988. At the Film Society, Richard Peña has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Ritwik Ghatak, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Wojciech Has, Louis Malle, Youssef Chahine, and Yasujiro Ozu, as well as major film series devoted to African, Taiwanese, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Cuban and Argentine cinema. In April, 2005, he organized a special tribute at Lincoln Center to Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Since 1996, he has organized together with Unifrance Film the annual “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today” program. He is also an Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema.