Slideshow
The Heart of Loisaida
Q&A with Annie Polland, President of the Tenement Museum, and Directors & Producers Beni Matías & Marci Reaven
Tuesday, February 17
6:00
Dr. Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Previously, she served as the Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit. Polland teaches a course on the Lower East Side in History and Memory at Princeton University.
Bienvenida (Beni) Matías is a pioneering Puerto Rican filmmaker with a long career as a producer/director of independent films. Her film, produced and directed with Marci Reaven, El Corazón de Loisaida (The Heart of Loisaida) was recognized by the New York Public Library as part of their film preservation initiative, “Twentieth Century Mirrors: America Through the Eyes of Independent Filmmakers.” Her current work-in-progress as producer/director is COQUITO, a meditation on Puerto Rican history via this quintessential Christmas drink. Beni is a member of NALIP, New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT), the Association of Puerto Rican Documentarians (ADocPR), and Brown Girl Doc Mafia (BGDM). She is a founding board member of In-Progress, a St. Paul, MN nonprofit media center, paving the way for new voices in digital art making. She has a Film Production degree from La Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (Spain).
Marci Reaven is a public historian, museum curator, and grant writer, with a background in documentary film. As vice president of history exhibitions at New-York Historical Society, she curated exhibits on topics such as the Vietnam War, the environmental history of the Hudson River, and the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Earlier, as Managing Director of City Lore, she co-founded and directed the Place Matters project on history, place, and public life. She holds a PhD in U.S. history from NYU.
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