Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is the author of REEL FAMILIES: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF AMATEUR FILM (Indiana, 1995) and STATES OF EMERGENCY: DOCUMENTARIES, WARS, DEMOCRACIES (Minnesota, 2000). She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of THE FLAHERTY: FOUR DECADES IN THE CAUSE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA (Wide Angle, 1996). Her forthcoming book, coedited with Karen Ishizuka, is MINING THE HOME MOVIE: EXCAVATIONS INTO HISTORIES AND MEMORIES (University of California Press). Her book on digital art, DIGITAL MEMORIES: CINEMAS, HISTORIES, VISUALITIES (Temple University Press, forthcoming), explores the relationship between historiography, political trauma, and digital art practices. With the late Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley, and Scott MacDonald, she coedits the WIDE ANGLE BOOKS series for Temple University Press, a series dedicated to documenting and analyzing the histories of the international nonprofit media arts sectors. Her many scholarly articles and essays on film history and historiography, documentary and experimental film/video/digital arts, amateur film, political economy of media, and digital culture theory have been published widely, both in the United States and internationally. She has delivered invited lectures and plenary addresses across the globe -- Canada, Colombia, Latvia, France, Wales, Russia, the Netherlands, England, and Germany -- and throughout the United States. As a journalist, her writing on media arts and media public policy has been published in The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Lola, Afterimage, Main, Lingua France, Search for a Common Ground, CommonDreams.org, and Filmmaker.com Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of the journals Wide Angle and The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She also serves on the national boards of Women Make Movies, Northeast Historic Film Archive (Maine), Konscious.Com, and Search for a Common Ground Film Festival (an international non-governmental organization dedicated to conflict resolution). She served as vice president of International Film Seminars, the arts organization sponsoring the renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminars. Working extensively as a curator and programmer, she has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history, a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians and scholars in Riga, Latvia, and "Explorations in Memory and Modernity," as well as other film, video, new media exhibitions, and artist's residencies. Her curated programs have screened nationally and internationally at a variety of museums, conferences, and film festivals. At Ithaca College, she has curated the Women Direct Film, Video, and New Media Series -- the longest running feminist media series on the East coast -- for the last 22 years. With colleagues across the Ithaca College campus, she co-curates Cinema on the Edge, an interdisciplinary initiative to bring together media artists, ideas, intellectuals, and cultural productions to engender collective debate and spirited inquiry into a variety of themes and contemporary issues.