Richard Peña
Richard Peña has been at Columbia since 1989, becoming full time in 1996 and being named Professor of Professional Practice in 2003. He has taught film history and theory at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Paris/Sorbonne, the University of São Paulo, Beijing University and Jadavpur University. Prof. Peña has also served as the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012. At the Film Society, he has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Gabriel Figueroa, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Chinese, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Japanese Soviet and Argentine cinema. He is also currently the co-host of Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.
Last December, Professor of Film and Media Studies Richard Peña reflected on his career by selecting six influential films to screen in a three-day festival at The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room in Columbia University School of the Arts's Lenfest Center for the Arts.