The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) announces that Dennis Doros, co-owner of Milestone Films, has been elected president of the international association by AMIA members. Doros will be inducted into office at the annual AMIA Conference in New Orleans (Nov. 29 – Dec. 2), when he will begin a two-year term. He succeeds Andrea Kalas, who has led the organization forward for the past two years.
AMIA members have also elected three new directors to the Board of Governors: Casey Davis Kaufman, senior project manager for the WGBH Media Library and Archives and project manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Andrea Leigh, moving image processing unit head at the Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center; and Yvonne Ng, senior archivist at WITNESS, an organization that supports people using video to protect human rights. They join board members Jayson Wall of The Walt Disney Studios, consultant and doctoral student Lauren Sorensen, doctoral student/field scholar Melissa Dollman, John Polito of Audio Mechanics, and Teague Schneiter from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
AMIA is the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to the acquisition, description, preservation, restoration, exhibition and use of audiovisual media. The association’s programs help members stay abreast of the latest methods and technologies, ensuring that our cultural treasures are accessible for future generations. The AMIA membership includes archivists, educators, librarians, digital asset managers, technologists, collectors, genealogists, filmmakers, historians, consultants, studio executives, environmentalists, distributors, and broadcasters from around the world — all of whom are actively engaged in the art and science of media preservation and presentation.
Doros comments, “I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to serve AMIA, an organization that has meant so much to me both personally and professionally. The friendships, connections, and camaraderie I have found here have helped me discover, research, and preserve some of the most challenging and rewarding projects of my career. I am inspired on a daily basis by this passionate and supportive international community. I know that working together, we can bring greater diversity, fairness, and outreach to our field while saving a lot of great moving images for generations to come.”
Doros began his career at Kino International in 1984, where he was responsible for restoring Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly and Raoul Walsh’s Sadie Thompson, both starring Gloria Swanson. In 1990, he co-founded Milestone Films with his wife, Amy Heller. Working with film archives and labs around the world, they have restored and distributed a wide range of independent films that include works by Shirley Clarke, Charles Burnett, Margot Benacerraf, Billy Woodberry, Kathleen Collins, Marcel Ophuls, and Kent Mackenzie. Filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Barbara Kopple, Steven Soderbergh, Thelma Schoonmaker, and author Sherman Alexie have worked with Milestone to promote special restoration projects. For the past 12 years, Doros has been a consultant to Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
Doros and Heller have been awarded the National Society of Film Critics’ Film Heritage Award five times and first Special Archival Award; the International Film Seminars’ Leo Award; the NY Film Critics Circle’s Special Award twice; the LA Film Critics’ first Legacy of Cinema Award; and a Film Preservation Honors award from Anthology Film Archives. Doros served three terms on the AMIA Board of Directors, and was the 2016 winner of AMIA’s William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award in recognition of his contributions to the field.
For more information, visit www.amianet.org.
