Amy Basen (she/her) is currently the Film and Images Services Librarian at CalArts. She is the supervising librarian for Film Services, Image Services, and the Bijou Theater, and the liaison librarian to the School of Film/Video.
As a visual artist, Amy works primarily in film and video as well as photography. Her interests include the history of photographic and filmmaking processes and technologies; optical printing; direct filmmaking techniques; the art of projection; preservation and maintenance of so-called obsolete projection technologies; digital preservation; and archival studies. Amy holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Hampshire College where she studied film, video, and photography, focusing on documentary and essay films. After seeing In Order Not To Be Here (2002) by CalArts alumnx Deborah Stratman, Amy returned to her home state of California to pursue her M.F.A. at CalArts in the Program in Film/Video. Amy’s work has been influenced by her undergraduate mentor Walid Raad and graduate mentor Thom Andersen, as well as courses with Bill Brand, Sherry Millner, Betzy Bromberg, Charlotte Pryce, and Lewis Klahr. As a student at CalArts, Amy was awarded a Graduate Assistantship and worked as the Lead Projectionist for the Bijou Theater. Her love of celluloid and hand processing 16mm film expanded into working with more direct filmmaking techniques.
After graduating, Amy accepted a position as the Library’s Film Services Manager. She decided to simultaneously pursue her Master’s in Library and Information Science (M.L.I.S.) at San Jose State University with a focus on archives and preservation to continue her work protecting and preserving the moving image collections at CalArts Library. Amy worked with a former colleague to secure a National Film Preservation Foundation Avant-Garde Masters Grant to preserve films by Ed Emshwiller (former Provost and School of Film/Video faculty member) and has been instrumental in the development of the CalArts Streaming Video Library. In addition to her work for CalArts Library, Amy has also worked as the Media Services and Advanced Media Production Manager for the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College, as a Media Center Assistant at the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, and as a teaching assistant for Elisabeth Subrin’s Video Production and Documentary Production courses at Mount Holyoke College and Amherst College, respectively.
Amy is currently a member of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). She is currently completing her Digital Archives Specialist certificate through SAA.