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.