Sheldon Renan
Film Scholar / Founding Director
Pacific Film Archive
[now called Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive]
University of Califonia, Berkeley
“How Avant-Garde Cinema Escaped the Screen to the Post-Network Age:
An Eyewitness Account”
FRIDAY, APRIL 20 • 12:15p
Sheldon Renan is a graduate of Yale University and a Rockefeller Grant recipient, which enabled him to write the first history of experimental media. He has lectured on media at museums, colleges and conferences around the world. Renan was recently an invited participant at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “A Symposium on Bruce Conner” (2016), as well as “Sheldon Renan Selects: Light and Time” (UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2016). He was also featured in Godard in America along with with Michael Dannenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Tom Luddy, and Andrew Sarris (RalphThanhauser, director, 1970).
Renan is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, and currently working on his next scholarly contribution, In All Ways Entangled (in development). Other works include Neither/Nor: Mondo Cinema and Beyond, 1960s – 1980s (with Nick Pinkerton, Chris Boeckmann, and Ragtag Film Society, 2016); “The Net and the Future of Being Fictive” (in Lynn Hershman Leeson, Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture. Bay Press, 1996); Study-Teaching Guide for the Independent Film (Grove Press, 1972); The Underground Film: An Introduction to its Development in America (Studio Vista, 1971); An Introduction to the American Underground Film ( E.P. Dutton & Co., 1967); “Festival at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque” (Art Voices, 1966); “The Blue Mouse and the Movie Experience” (Film Culture, 1966). His films include: Basic Film Terms: A Visual Dictionary (with David Adams, Ralph Story, and Sargon Tamini, Pyramid Films/The Media Preserve, 2016); AIDS: What Everyone Needs to Know (UCLA AIDS Center; Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Immunology and Diseases at UCLA, Churchill Films, 1987); Diabetes: Focus on Feelings (with Dennis Passaggio, Pyramid Films, 1980).
He consults for the public sector, and his government clients range from the U.S. Military Health Service and Department of State to the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida. Renan has served as a creative director, writing and consulting for major technology and product launches for Intel, IBM, Xerox, SAP, AT&T, Sony, and Apple.