UPCOMING EVENTS
CONFERENCES
Co-organizer:
Women and Film History International:
Entr’ Acte 2026
Women and Film History International:
Women and the Silent Screen 2027
Warburg Institute London, UK [proposed]
Workshop/conference 2026:
Symbolic Visual Forms in the Marion Stancioff Archive
- an Iconological Approach for Putting Ideas into Practice
FILMS
NIGHTWOOD – FEATURE FILM in production
Screenwriter/ Co-producer
Film adaptation of Djuna Barnes’ novel, Nightwood
HAT DOCUMENTARY in production
Writer/Co-producer
Based on: Hats: Origins, Language, Style
Directors:
Roberta Friedman
www.robertafriedmanfilm.com
Dan Lowenthal
www.imdb.com/name/nm0517366/
PAST EVENTS - SELECTED
CONFERENCES
Co-organizer:
Women and Film History International
Women and the Silent Screen: Feeling and Form in Silent Cinema
Brussels & Antwerp 2025
Women and Film History International
Entr’ Acte: Creative Historiographies, online 2024
Film Costume/State of the Art New York University
Honoring the Fort Lee film industry where American cinema began—with today’s artists, scholars, filmmakers and practitioners on topics such as avant-garde art, counterfeiting, animation, and fashion icons.
Film Costume/Rendering Realities New York University
Exploring costume’s role in cinema’s multiple constructions of history and their impact on culture—with today’s costume designers, hip hop artists, museum curators and auctioneers on topics from Hindi film stars to a painter’s influence on 1910s cinema.
Film Costume/ Who Designed Marilyn’s Dress?:
Impact, Craft, and Future of Film Costume New York University
Honoring the great costume house, Tirelli Costumi, in Rome, with guest speaker Tirelli director Dino Trappetti, and today’s costume designers, fabricators, filmmakers, scholars, and students.
PANELS
The Experimental Films of Warren Sonbert
Drake Stutesman and Jon Gartenberg in conversation,
Museum of Modern Art, New York 2023
BBC World Service
The Forum
Famous Hats in History, panel discussion
December 31, 2020; January 2 and January 3, 2021
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszjwk
LECTURES
RAGE: The Emotional Climate of Union Activism on Silent Era Film Production in Non-Union Los Angeles and Women Who Led Changes in Labor Fights
Women and Silent Screen, Brussels 2025
SECOND SKIN: Nicole Tran Ba Vang in Brice Dellsperger’s Re-Enactment Video Body Double(X)
UCLA, Los Angeles 2024
SUPER FLY, MALE COSTUME AND MELODRAMA
Critical Costume Conference, (Norway/online due to COVID-19), 2020
Melodramatic tropes appear in the costumes of Super Fly, the 1972 African American crime film about New York’s narcotic trade. It has a nineteenth century melodrama understory - that of an individual fighting an oppressive social system – but Super Fly’s reliance on presentation also places it in melodrama. The lead character’s exceptional costumes, designed by Nate Adams, create a new amalgamation of crime paradigm, material excess, bold masculinity, emotional pathos and melodramatic narrative that has roots in centuries of African American use of subversion and protest through clothing and costume.
THE GAY COUPLE IN TELEVISION’S PERRY MASON
New York University, New York, 2019
Perry Mason(1957–1966, CBS-TV) is known for its formulaic plots—attorney Mason (Raymond Burr) defends an innocent client and forces the real murderer to confess in a courtroom finale. With its stylish noir filming, outdoor locations, and deep background characterizations, the series arguably also featured a prescient queer subtext. Burr was a gay man who led a covert life, but on the show, Mason is consistently paired with his investigator, Paul Drake (William Hopper), in harmonious, sometimes domestic contexts—especially notable in the 1962 episode, The Case of the Borrowed Baby.
THE SENTENCES OF DJUNA BARNES
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2015
Djuna Barnes “makes the common unusual.”
— James Joyce
“The perfume her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odorof the oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire.”
— Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
This talk shows how a deep deconstruction of even a single sentence in the lush language of Djuna Barnes’ novel, Nightwood, reveals a profound and astute understanding of people’s lives.