Anne Friedberg

Who was Anne Friedberg?

Anne Friedberg was Chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. An author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, Friedberg received her PhD. in Cinema Studies from NYU. She was on the faculty of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where she was the principal architect for a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Visual Studies and the founding director and programmer of UCI's Film and Video Center. In 2003, she joined the USC faculty, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate and the Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. program. In 2009, she was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She died in Los Angeles on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57.

Friedberg lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere, including invited talks in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna, Tokyo, Montreal, Bern, Lausanne, Stockholm, Prague, and at the Guggenheim Museum/NY, Art Institute/Chicago, and Getty Museum/LA. In 2001-2002, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. During 2005-2006, she was a fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center as a member of the Networked Publics research group.