Peter Cowie, moderator
In 1963, Peter Cowie launched the annual International Film Guide, which appeared under his editorship for 40 years. He has written more than 30 books about film, including biographies of Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Francis Ford Coppola, studies of Scandinavian film and, more recently, John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. Among the publications he has written articles for are The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, the London Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Expressen, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, The Nation, and Sight and Sound. He was International Publishing Director of Variety from 1993 to 2000, and Regents’ Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Cowie has written numerous commentaries for Criterion DVD’s, and has recently served as producer on Criterion's box-set of Olympic films 1912-2012.
David Bordwell
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, he has been Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. His books include studies of Dreyer, Ozu, Eisenstein, American cinema, and Hong Kong film. His most recent books are The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture and Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. With his wife Kristin Thompson he has written two textbooks, Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction. They blog at his website www.davidbordwell.net.
Ty Burr
Ty has reviewed films for the Boston Globe since 2002 and has written a weekly column on all aspects of popular culture since 2015. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame (2013) and The Best Old Movies for Families (2007). He wrote for Entertainment Weekly during the 1990s and programmed movies for Cinemax in the 1980s. A member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics, Ty also teaches courses in film and criticism at Boston University and Tufts University. In 2017, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.
Justin Chang
Justin Chang is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and Southern California Public Radio’s FilmWeek on AirTalk. Before joining the L.A. Times, he was chief film critic at Variety. He is the author of the book FilmCraft: Editing and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. In 2014, he received the inaugural Roger Ebert Award from the African-American Film Critics Association. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California.
Glenn Kenny
Glenn Kenny writes on film for RogerEbert.com and other publications. He also contributes essays and audio commentaries to the Criterion Collection, Arrow Video, and Indicator. He is the author of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert DeNiro (Phaedon/Cahiers du Cinema, 2014) and the editor of A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of 'Star Wars' (Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2002). His rock band Artificial Intelligence, now defunct, will nevertheless release an album, "Revisionist History," in 2018.
Savina Neirotti
Born in Genova, she graduated in Philosophy and completed the first year of Master in Aesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning to Italy, she became Head of the Press and Communication Office of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, where she was also in charge of the Educational Department. In the same years she founded Scuola Holden in Torino together with Alessandro Baricco. She is Director of Scuola Holden’s Master in Narration Techniques, and she supervises all the school activities, focusing on the international contacts. In the last ten years Savina has written articles and interviews on narration and classical music, book reviews and film reviews for Italian and international newspapers. She has been in charge of Script&Pitch Workshops since 2005, and Director of the TorinoFilmLab since 2008. She is the Head of Programme for the Biennale College Cinema.
Chris Vognar
Chris Vognar was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University. He is currently Culture Critic for the Dallas Morning News, where he has worked since 1996. Chris co-hosts the Big Screen show on KERA, Dallas’ NPR affiliate. He has taught journalism at Harvard Summer School, film history at the University of Texas at Arlington and arts journalism at Southern Methodist University. He earned his B.A in English from UC Berkeley.
Stephanie Zacharek
Stephanie Zacharek is the film critic for Time magazine. She was previously chief film critic for the Village Voice and Salon.com, and and her writing on books and pop culture has also appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and Sight and Sound. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
