Walker Dialogues and Film Retrospectives Series: The First 30 Years
This project, which took five months to curate, is an online archive featuring more than 60 in-depth portraits of directors, actors, writers, and producers who were celebrated in the Walker Cinema at pivotal moments in their careers. The dynamic catalogue is enriched throughout with archival sound and video interview recordings, transcripts, photography, and ephemera, as well as essays and articles written for the esteemed series of intimate onstage interviews and film retrospectives that screened between 1990-2020. It was released April 28, 2020.
I worked on nearly every step of the project from start to finish. My contributions begin with writing the abstracts — the paragraph introducing all 64 filmmakers/actors/producers to readers. The abstracts consider the Dialogues honoree only from the year they visited the Walker. The goal of this project was to create a portrait of this long list of incredible creatives at the oftentimes pivotal point in their careers when they visited the museum. I did a substantial amount of research to make sure each abstract was not only factually correct, but interesting and informative.
I also helped to populate each individual webpage with film stills, scans of the original program notes and brochures, a YouTube video featuring the dialogue, links to films discussed in the video and related content. I made artistic choices throughout this process, including choosing featured film stills. Below, director William Klein’s page, which includes my favorite images and brochure design.
