Fred Astaire: The Conference
ORIEL COLLEGE OXFORD
21–24 JUNE 2008

Catherine A. Surowiec

Catherine A. Surowiec is an independent film historian, researcher, and copyeditor. During her years working in the film archive of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, she contributed to books for the department’s major retrospectives on French and British cinema (Rediscovering French Film, 1983; Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, 1984) and Vincente Minnelli (Directed by Vincente Minnelli, 1989), as well as The Film Catalog (1985), MoMA’s first published catalogue of holdings. Based in London since 1985, she has worked as a freelance researcher on a variety of projects, including the Museum of the Moving Image, the London Film Festival, and the British Film Institute’s designs collection, and has pursued her love of cinema via a range of publications, notably The LUMIERE Project: The European Film Archives at the Crossroads (Editor; 1996), This Film Is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film (Associate Editor; FIAF, 2002; winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award), and Accent on Design: Four European Art Directors (Author; BFI, 1992). She has also written for the New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press; entries on film designers), the Cinema Ritrovato film festival catalogue, Bologna, Italy (notes on Vincente Minnelli muscials), and The Movie Book (Phaidon, 1999; entries on directors, designers, and stars, including Fred Astaire). She has edited the festival catalogue for the Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone silent film festival, Italy) since 2000, and also does editorial work for the Journal of Film Preservation, published by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), Brussels. Musicals have been a lifelong passion, and attending this first-ever conference about her longtime idol Fred Astaire is a dream come true.

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"The Astaire Conference" is an organization which contracts with the College for the use of facilities,
but which has no formal connection with The University of Oxford.

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