About Women And Film History International 

Women and Film History International (WFHI) is committed to the research, preservation, and exhibition of women’s global film history. 

WFHI is a gender diverse and trans inclusive organization, both on our steering committee and in our membership. We strive to intervene upon dominant historical narratives that have largely excluded women, LGBTQIA+ folks, and people of color.

One of WFHI’s most important activities is organizing the Women and the Silent Screen conference (WSS), a biennial scholarly event that focuses on women’s diverse contributions to global film industries and cinema cultures before synchronous sound production. This event draws together researchers, historians, students, archivists, curators, and filmmakers from around the world.

The first Women and the Silent Screen conference, then called “Gender and Silent Cinema,” took place at Utrecht University in 1999. Since then, the conference has traveled around the United States and Europe as well as to Mexico, Australia, and China, among other places.

Many of our founding members and extended network were also involved in two key feminist scholarly initiatives that began in the late 1990s and early 2000s: The Women Film Pioneers Project, founded by Jane M. Gaines in 1994 and launched online in 2013; and the Women and Film History International book series (now known as Women Media History Now!) at the University of Illinois Press, established in 2009.

Since 2021, WFHI also hosts Entr’acte, an online-only event held during the years that alternate with WSS.

WFHI is entirely volunteer run.


The Steering Committee

President

  • Drake Stutesman is the current President of WFHI and an adjunct professor at New York University. She is the Senior Editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and author of cultural histories Hat: Origin, Language,Style (2019) and Snake (2005) published by Reaktion Books. She co-edited Film, Fashion and 1960s (2018). She has taught at the Pratt Institute, the Bard Graduate Center, University of Stockholm and Holloway Prison (UK) among others.  Her work has been published by, among others, the British Film Institute, Columbia University Press, Koenig Books, Museum of Modern Art (NY) and Museum of Contemporary Art (LA). She is completing a cultural history of subversive stories hidden in generic entertainment that address socially forbidden issues. 

Secretary

  • Kristine Harris is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz.  With a specialization in the history of film and media, gender, literature, and visual culture of twentieth-century China, Harris has also taught at the University of Chicago as Visiting Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in 2007 and 2009.  In June 2024, as Invited Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, she delivered lectures on Chinese film history of the 1930s and on the origins and afterlives of The Red Detachment of Women.  Her research has appeared in The Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2024); The Journal of Chinese Film Studies (2023); Les Sons de l’exotisme au cinéma: Bruits, voix, musiques (2022); Harvard New Literary History of Modern China (2017); The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (2013); History in Images: Pictures and Public Space in Modern China (2012); The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (2011), and Opera Quarterly (2010), among others. Currently she is working on a book about Love and Duty and the life and work of S. Rosen-Hoa. She has served on the WFHI Steering Committee since 2022

Treasurer

  • Tanya Goldman is a film historian, educator, and film programmer based in the United States. She has taught cinema and media studies courses at Bowdoin College, Brooklyn College, Hofstra University, Hunter College, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing has appeared in Criterion Currents, Feminist Media Histories, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, The Moving Image, and several edited essay collections, among others. Her favorite woman filmmaker is Lee Dick, director of nontheatrical films about education, nursing, and public health in the 1930s to '50s. For more about Tanya's activities, visit tanyagoldmanphd.com 

Future President

  • Kate Saccone is a  PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam where her practice-led project engages with silent cinema, archival moving image exhibition practice and theory, and critical-feminist approaches to curatorial labor. Her writing has appeared in The Moving Image and Feminist Media Histories, and she contributed the DVD booklet essay for Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology (Flicker Alley, 2017). As a curator, Kate has organized screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Public Library and the Netherlands Silent Film Festival, among other places. She is also  the project manager and an editor of the Women Film Pioneers Project, and has served on the steering committee of Women and Film History International since 2022.

Members at Large

  • Tami Williams is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and served two terms as President of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema (2016-2024). She is the author, editor, and/or co-editor of six books, including Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema (2024), Provenance and Early Cinema (2021), Germaine Dulac: What is Cinema? (2019, 2020 CNC Prix du livre), Global Cinema Networks (2018), Performing New Media, 1895-1915 (2014), and Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), as well as a special issue of The Moving Image on “Early Cinema and the Archives” (2016), and the AFRHC journal 1895, entitled Germaine Dulac, au-delà des impressions (2006). She also serves as a board member of Women Film History International.

  • Kiki Loveday  is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and scholar working at the intersection of history, narrative and the moving image. Their current book project traces the historical emergence of the motion picture director through a series of Sappho films produced during the silent era (1900–1931). Her scholarly work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Women Film Pioneers Project and Framework and is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. Kiki's creative work has exhibited in venues from The Coney Island Film Festival in New York City to The Virginia Scott Galleries of American Art at The Huntington in Los Angeles. She co-founded The Women in the Director’s Chair Oral History Project at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College.

  • Enrique Moreno Ceballos is a Ph.D. candidate at the Posgrado en Historia del Arte de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Enri’s research is centered around the very first women film exhibitors and cinema proprietors of Mexico, inspired by the longstanding views and ever blossoming perspectives of Feminist Film History. The findings of such work have been acknowledged by initiatives such as peer-reviewed journal Vivomatografías and Domitor. As a curator, Enri has been a participant of the 2018, 2023, and 2024 programs of Pordenone’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, and is also founder and director of Mexico’s Silent Film Festival-FIC Silente MX. With a strong conviction about creating communities of fair and equal access to knowledge, Enri is currently a proud member of Women Film History International.

  • Kathy Rose O'Regan is the Executive Director of San Francisco Film Preserve (SFFP). SFFP's mission is to restore, preserve, and provide access to the world’s cinematic heritage, ensuring that films—of all genres and eras—remain accessible for future generations. Originally from Galway in the west of Ireland, Kathy has been based in San Francisco for seventeen years. She served as the Senior Film Restorer for San Francisco Silent Film Festival, overseeing all operations of the preservation department and managing the restoration of dozens of silent era titles. Previously, she managed the preservation department of the Bay Area Video Coalition. Kathy is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, a recipient of a National Film and Sound Archive of Australia fellowship, and a steering committee member of Women and Film History International.