Richard Peña

Infobox_Celebrity
name = Richard Peña
birth_date = 1953
birth_place = New York City, USA
death_date =
occupation = Film programme and festival director
family = Married, three children

Richard Peña (born 1953) is an American film program director noted for his organization of the New York Film Festival.

Early life

Interested in film at a very young age, when Richard was just 12 years old, he was already attending the New York Film Festival, to view a rarely shown Erich von Stroheim movie.

Even as a boy, he has admitted that he was a passionate film buff, and this passion was sparked when he began attending Spanish language films with his grandparents at the Elgin Theater in Chelsea.

Two decades later, Peña helps choose the films that are featured at that prestigious festival. That's part of his role at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Education and career

At Harvard University, Peña combined his love of film with his interest in Latin American culture. A son of Spanish and Puerto Rican parents, he spent a year in Rio de Janeiro for his senior thesis on Brazilian cinema and Argentine cinema.

After earning a master's degree in film at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Peña taught film at several colleges before joining the Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually being named its director.

In 1988, now a film scholar he came to the Lincoln Center where he has been working ever since.

Since then he has been also been film program director for the New York Film Festival. He has the power to overlook which films are shown at the festival on an annual basis, welcoming in world films and foreign language films which often wouldn't be allowed to appear in many other mainstream festivals.

At the Film Society, Richard Peña has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Wojciech Has, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, and most recently Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Taiwanese, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Cuban and Argentine cinema.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Peña was involved in the controversy over Abbas Kiarostami, who was refused an immigration visa to attend the festival because of his middle-eastern roots. Peña had personally invited Kiarostami to the festival but his admission to the United States was repudiated. In the event Peña stated: "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world"

From 2001 to 2002, Richard Peña was the host on the Sundance Channel's "Conversations in World Cinema, " on which he interviewed Harmony Korine among other leading filmmakers. Since 1996, he has organized together with Unifrance Film the annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today" program.

Other work

He is also an Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema

Personal Quotes

"Film transcends culture and borders in a way poetry and painting cannot"

"With film, you're seeing images, confronting situations, as if you were walking down the street," he says. "You discover a certain universality, as opposed to differences, among people."

References

*http://www.newyorkbusiness-risingstars.com/profile.php?pageNum_profile_detail=28&year=21
*http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Pena_Richard_020107.html