Conservation of Video Art
Workshop Leaders & Speakers
MoMA Team
Kate Lewis is a Media Conservator and the Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has worked with artists including David Lamelas, Suzanne Lacy, Cildo Meireles, Tony Oursler and Lis Rhodes. Prior to joining MoMA she held the position of Time-based Media Conservator at Tate in London (2005-2013). She earned her M.A. in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper from the University of Northumbria, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Engaged in training and education Lewis leads this five-year Media Conservation Initiative funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address the long-term preservation of media-based works through collaborative professional training, and serves on the Board of Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA).
Peter Oleksik is Associate Media Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where he has been working since 2011 to conserve the museum's vast time-based media collection across curatorial departments. Peter is part of the Matters in Media Art (MMA) team, a collaboration between SFMOMA, The Tate and MoMA to provide resources on time-based media conservation. Outside of MoMA, Peter regularly works with artists, filmmakers and musicians to preserve and provide access to their media collections. Oleksik received his BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Southern California and his MA from New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program where he has served as an adjunct professor.
Amy Brost is Assistant Media Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, where she works with the Media and Performance collection as well as with the museum's digital repository for art. She has worked in-depth on sound elements in media installations, documentation of media artworks, and digital preservation and storage of media art. She earned an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology and an M.S. in Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds bachelor's degrees in studio art and art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an associate in science degree in chemistry from New York City College of Technology. Before entering the conservation field, she worked for 10 years in advertising and communications.
Sarah Gentile is an Assistant Digital Preservation Specialist at the Museum of Modern Art. In that role, she works to implement digital storage systems for the Digital Repository for Museum Collections (DRMC). She has over fifteen years of professional experience in digital projects at various cultural heritage institutions across New York City. Previously, she was an Associate Archivist at Brooklyn Museum, and later, an Archivist and Digital Project Manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts and a master's from Queens College, CUNY with a certificate in Archives and Records Management. She is also a member of XFR Collective, working to preserve at-risk video with live transfer sessions, screenings, and ongoing community AV preservation education.
Lia Kramer is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation at MoMA. She has previously conducted Time-based Media conservation projects for institutions including Tate, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Lia holds an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology and an M.S. in Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from Georgia State University.
Eugene Albertelli is currently the Department Manager for The David Booth Conservation Department at MoMA.
Guest Speakers
Sophie Bunz completed a Masters program in Conservation-Restoration of Modern Materials and Media at Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland in 2016. After her studies she held a fellowship at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany and worked as an assistant for the media conservation-restoration program at her university of graduation. She has worked for the Studio for Video Conservation, Bern since 2018. Sophie takes a keen interest in ethical considerations and the development of methodical solutions for the documentation and preservation of time-based media art.
Jon Dieringer is the founder, publisher, and editor of Screen Slate. He oversees the preservation and archiving of moving image artwork as the Technical Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Aside from his regular ongoing writing for Screen Slate, Dieringer has authored articles and video essays on art, film, and photography for TIME, TIME LightBox, BOMB, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, The Village Voice, and Canyon Cinemazine. As a programmer, he has worked most prolifically at daily Brooklyn microcinema Spectacle and additionally curated programs and series at 92YTribeca, Anthology Film Archives, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Many of these artist-focused series have focused on correspondences between archives and obsolete or overlooked media. As a media artist, Dieringer's video work has shown at venues including Anthology Film Archives, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Flux Factory, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Arts and Design, The Pittsburgh Three Rivers Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Salon 94, Spectacle, The Squeaky Wheel Art Center (Buffalo), and The Nightingale (Chicago).
Jonathan Farbowitz is currently the Associate Conservator of Time-Based Media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he cares for the film, video, audio, slide, and software-based artworks in the Met's collection. Previously, he was a Fellow in the Conservation of Computer-Based Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where he addressed the preservation needs of computer-based works in the Guggenheim’s collection. He was part of an interdisciplinary team that restored three web artworks; Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon (1998-99), John F. Simon, Jr.'s Unfolding Object (2002), and Mark Napier’s net.flag (2002). Farbowitz has lectured internationally on digital preservation topics. He holds an MA in Moving Archiving and Preservation from New York University and has previous experience in software development and testing.
Agathe Jarczyk is the Associate Time-based Media Conservator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Between 2011 and 2019 she was an adjunct professor at the Department of Conservation and Restoration at the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. In 2008 she founded the Studio for Video Conservation and has been working for numerous Swiss and international museums and collections as conservator and consultant. Besides authoring different articles on practical aspects on the conservation of video art, Jarczyk is a co-author of the Compendium of Image Errors in Analogue Video published in 2013.
Alexandra Nichols is a Conservator, Time-Based Media at Tate, focusing on exhibitions and displays. Prior to working at Tate, she completed a two-year Sherman Fairchild Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a one-year Samuel Kress Fellowship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both focusing on the conservation of time-based media. Alexandra holds an MS in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. During her graduate studies, she completed internships at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Chinati Foundation, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Maurice Schechter was the Chief Engineer at DuArt Restoration in New York for over 20 years. He is widely known as a media preservationist, archivist, and television historian. He has also lectured and held workshops on the technology of conservation and preservation of film and video at The Guggenheim Museum in NYC, The David Sarnoff Library in Princeton, NJ, New York University, The Early Television Museum in Ohio, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. For over 10 years he has worked on the conservation and treatment of time based media artworks.