Born and raised in France, Bérénice Reynaud studied philosophy at Paris I-Sorbonne, Cinema Studies at New York University and was a Helena Rubenstein fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program. Meanwhile she was curating radio programs of New American Music for Radio France and writing articles for the French film monthly Cahiers du cinéma – and was a member of Aprés-Coup, a New York-based group of scholars and psychoanalysts led by Lacanian psychoanalyst Paula Mieli. In the late 1980s, she developed an interest in Chinese cinema and is a pioneer of the introduction of Chinese video art and video documentary in both the United States and France.
As a critic, her main areas of expertise have been American independent/experimental film/video; films and video by women; Chinese cinema and video; African cinema; gender and feminist film theory. She was a regular collaborator of Cahiers du cinéma (France) from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, and is currently a regular contributor of Senses of Cinema (www,sensesofcinema.com) (Australia). She has published essays in Sight & Sound, Screen (UK); Film Comment, Afterimage, The Independent (USA); Le Monde diplomatique, Libération, CinémAction (France); Meteor, Springerin (Austria); Nosferatu (Spain) and Cinemaya, the Asian Film Quarterly (India), among others - as well as in a number of scholarly publications, encyclopedias and catalogue articles in the US, the UK, France, Austria and Italy. She is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinemas (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien's "A City of Sadness" (London: BFI, 2002, and has co-edited a collection of texts on feminist film criticism, Vingt ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma - Grande-Bretagne et États-Unis (Paris: CinemAction, 1993).
As a curator, she has organized film and video exhibitions for Artists Space, The Collective for Living Cinema, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Moving Image (New York); the UCLA Film & Television Archives (Los Angeles); The Cinémathèque française, The Festival d'Automne and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris). Since the opening of REDCAT in November 2003, Reynaud has shared curatorial responsibilities for the Jack Skirball Film/Video screening series with former School of Film/Video Dean (and current F/V faculty) Steve Anker. A correspondent for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain: www.sansebastianfestival.com) since 1993 and the Viennale (Austria/Europe: www.viennale.at) since 2000, as well as Curatorial Adviser and member of the Programming Committee for the China Onscreen Biennial (Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York: http://www.chinaonscreen.org/) since 2014, she has also organized a program of Chinese cinema the Kerala International Film Festival (India: http://iffk.in/) in 2015. She was one of the main organizers of “Against Oblivion,” the Chantal Akerman retrospective that took place in several Los Angeles venues and at New York’s BAM in the Spring 2016. She curated a major retrospective about contemporary Chinese cinema 2000-2016 for the Cinémathèque française in Jan-Feb 2017 (http://www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/nouvelles-voix-du-cinema-chinois-366.html). She has lectured on a variety of subjects from gender theory to Asian cinema/video to experimental film throughout the United States, France, Belgium, Austria, The Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.