Programmers

Janaína Oliveira

Janaína is a film scholar and curator. Professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ) and consultant for JustFilms - Ford Foundation, she has a PhD in History and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University. Since 2009, she has been developing research and curating film programs, mainly focusing on Black and African Cinemas, as well as working as a consultant, jury member, and lecturer at various film festivals and institutions in Brazil and abroad.

Janaína programmed the 2021 Seminar Opacity.

  • In 2019, she organized the exhibition “Soul in the Eye: Zózimo Bulbul's Legacy and the Contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema” at the IFFR - International Film Festival Rotterdam. She was also a consultant for films from Africa and the Black Diaspora for the Locarno International Film Festival (2019-2020). She is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE) and programmed the Flaherty Film Seminar in 2021, OPACITY, and the Encontro de Cinema Negro Zózimo Bulbul from 2017 to 2021.  Besides participating in other curatorial initiatives, currently she is part of the BlackStar Film Festival curatorial team as the documentary feature film section Chair, member of Fespaco's  Selection Committee, as well as from the advisory board of Doc's Kingdom (Portugal) and the curatorial board of Criterion Channel (USA). In 2025, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Film Department.  Samples of her work can be found here. 

 

Carlos A. Gutiérrez

Carlos is the co-founding executive director of Cinema Tropical, the leading U.S. promoter of Latin American cinema since 2001. He has curated series for institutions, including MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, and the Flaherty Seminar. He is the artistic director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Latin Wave festival, co-director of Cinema Tucsón.

With Mahen Bonetti, Carlos co-programmed the 2007 Seminar, South of the Other.

  • A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a Film Forum board member, Gutiérrez has served as a juror and panelist for renowned festivals and funds including IDFA, Tribeca, DocLisboa, Mar del Plata, Morelia, and the Sundance Documentary Fund.

 

Richard Herskowitz

Richard is a media arts curator and administrator who has served as director of Cornell Cinema, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Virginia Film Festival, and Houston Cinema Arts Festival. He has taught film studies and curated media art exhibitions for museums at U.Va., Cornell, and the University of Oregon, and has written extensively on film and other cultural subjects.

He has been a Seminar programmer multiple times (1987 – Wells College, 1990 – Riga, 1999 – Duke University, with Orlando Bagwell) and president of the board of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as well as chair of its 50th Anniversary Committee.

 

Christopher Harris

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema.
Harris is Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University and splits time between Princeton, New Jersey and Coralville, Iowa.

  • Harris’ screenings include solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Tate Modern, Tiff Lightbox, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others; a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Harris is the recipient of a 2025 United States Artists Fellowship, the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, a 2020–2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award as well as many other awards.

 

Zaina Bseiso

Zaina Bseiso is a filmmaker, educator, and curator. She is a Senior Programmer at the Points North Institute and the co-founder of Bahia Collective, a community of filmmakers dedicated to collaborative practice and curation. In 2024, she served as a curatorial fellow at the Flaherty Seminar and filmmaker-in-residence at the Duke DocX Lab. She holds an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts.

  • Bseiso additionally serves on the programming board of LA Filmforum. Currently in post-production, her first feature, Todo Lo Sólido, has received support from Sundance, Sandbox Films, Visions Sud Est, among others. ext goes here

 

Louis Massiah

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides production workshops to community groups and emerging media makers. Massiah has presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and has been a co-programmer and board member.

  • DescriptionAs an educator and institution builder, Massiah has developed production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 150 collaborative documentaries; Muslim Voices of Philadelphia; The Great Migration - A City Transformed and currently The Tenants of Lenapehoking in the Age of Magnets, an oral history of an African-American community.

    Massiah’s documentaries include TCB – the Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, The Bombing of Osage Avenue, Cecil B. Moore, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown. A MacArthur Foundation “genius award” fellow, he is currently an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. text goes here