PROFILE

Richard Peña is an Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, where he specialized in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organized retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, Hong Kong, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, and Argentine cinema. In 2009, Peña co-curated at Lincoln Center the largest exhibition of early African-American cinema ever organized. Together with Unifrance, Peña created Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in 1995, the largest showcase for contemporary French film in North America.

A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton; in 2015-2016 a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard; and in 2022 a Visiting Professor in Art History at La Sorbonne. He has also taught courses at Beijing University, Gedai Art Institute (Tokyo), la Universidad de Cine (Buenos Aires), the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Universidad Católica de Chile, and the University of São Paulo. In May 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” award at UNAM in Mexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema.” In 2024, he was the Walt Disney Professor of American Art and Culture at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and in Spring 2025 was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Qatar.