Biography

Anthony Silvestri is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Media School at Indiana University. His dissertation focuses on the archival practice of post-war American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Specifically, he focuses on the Kenneth Anger Mixed Media Collections, amassed by the filmmaker over a period of seven decades in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington. Additionally, he has done some examination of the Kenneth Anger clippings at the Museum of Death in Los Angeles. Broadly, these collections touch upon issues surrounding the history of and historicization of sexuality, queer media, archival institutions, autobiographical archiving,  archival excess, legacy, experimental media and pornography.

Anthony currently serves as the Managing Editor of Film History: An International Journal. He is a recipient of the Kinsey Institute’s 2019 John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology. He holds a position as the graduate student representative for the Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). He has presented his work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Annual Conference and Visible Evidence. He is currently a co-programmer of the Underground Film Series at I.U. Cinema.

Anthony received his M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2015, and his B.A. in Film Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014.

Publications (Peer-Reviewed)

Anthony L. Silvestri, “A Conflict Between the Token Guardians of Society and a Man’s Private Life: Kenneth Anger, Palo Alto Kodak, the Kinsey Institute, and the Circulation of Marvin Samuel’s Amateur S/M Pornography,” Porn Studies (forthcoming, accepted)

Anthony L. Silvestri, “Kenneth Anger and the Filmed Archive Reenactment,” Journal of Film and Video (forthcoming, accepted)

Chapters in Edited Collections

Anthony L. Silvestri,  “Kenneth Anger’s Sixties: Scorpio Rising, Sexology and the Demise of the Hippie Flower-Child Phenomenon,” in Wounded Galaxies 1968: Film, eds. Joan Hawkins and Chris Dumas (forthcoming)

Courses Taught as Instructor of Record

MSCH-A 315: Advertising and Consumer Culture

MSCH-F 375: Race, Gender and Representation in Media- American Cinema

MSCH-F 392: Media Genres – Horror

MSCH-P 331: Script Writing

Awards 

The John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, 2019

Graduate Student Achievement Award for Best Research Paper: “Kenneth Anger and the Filmed Archive Reenactment,” Indiana University, 2019

Selected Service

Graduate Student Representative, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group, 2019-Present

Selection and Awards Committee, Montage: A Celebration of Moving Pictures, 2019 and 2020

Jury Member, InLight Human Rights Film Festival, 2019

Guest Lecturer, The Digital Cinema Academy at the Media School, 2018 and 2019

Film Programming

Co-Coordinator, The Underground Film Series at Indiana University Cinema and the IULMIA Screening Room

• Ken Jacobs on 16mm (Short Film Program), April 24th, 2020
• Media Distortions: The Avant-Garde and Mass Culture, January 22nd, 2020
• The Spiritual Avant-Garde (Short Film Program), October 4th, 2019
• Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, January 22nd, 2019

Guest Programmer, Social Guidance Sundays (I.U. Libraries Moving Image Archive)

• Santa’s Sack of 16mm Film and Fun, December 8th, 2019