Rochester, N.Y., December 23, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has received a grant award of $600,000 for the restoration of the museum’s historic garden structures from the New York State Office for Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation through Title 9 of the Environmental Protection Act of 1993, in conjunction with the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council. The restored structures on George Eastman’s estate, a National Historic Landmark, will include the pergola in the Schuyler C.

Rochester, N.Y., December 10, 2019—The George Eastman Museum recently completed a major upgrade to the crucial environmental conditions of its collection storage areas. The Environmental Improvements Implementation Project, at a total cost of $1,246,000, included the replacement and upgrade of 30-year-old systems that controlled the temperature and humidity for the photography vault, technology vault, and photography study center.

Rochester, N.Y., December 10, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will present the 6th Nitrate Picture Show from June 4 to 7, 2020 at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, NY. The Nitrate Picture Show, the world’s festival of film conservation, will celebrate its 6th year with a new, extended lineup of nitrate prints on screen, workshops, and behind-the-scenes tours of the museum and its collection areas.

Rochester, N.Y., November 18, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has announced it will break ground on January 6, 2020, for a new visitor center, which includes construction of the ESL Federal Credit Union Pavilion. The visitor center project, which involves relocating the museum’s main entrance to the west side of the building, is the most significant structural change to the museum since the gallery and collections building was constructed in 1989. The project is expected to be complete by July 2020.

Rochester, N.Y., November 15, 2019—The George Eastman Museum, in partnership with the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music, and Hamilton College will present Filmi Worlds: A Festival of Indian Cinema at the Dryden Theatre on November 21. The festival continues on November 23 and 24. This three-day film festival and symposium will combine film screenings, scholarly talks, and public conversations about South Asian film.

Rochester, N.Y., November 7, 2019—Cinephiles know a film comes to life only when it is presented on the big screen. With digital theaters becoming the norm, the need for a skilled film projectionist is becoming so rare that the craft itself is in danger. The Art of Film Projection—A Beginner’s Guide is the George Eastman Museum’s venture to capture the essence of film projection from both sides of the machine and to offer a playbook to reproduce the magic of cinema for an audience.

Rochester, N.Y., November 1, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will kick off the holiday season on November 8, when the annual Sweet Creations—the exquisite display of dozens of cleverly designed and deliciously decorated gingerbread houses­—opens to the public. The display will be on view through December 15.

Rochester, N.Y., October 23, 2019—The George Eastman Museum announced today that it will honor the late actor Robert Forster on Saturday, November 2 with special screenings of Medium Cool (1969) at 1 p.m. and Jackie Brown (1997) at 4 p.m. in the Dryden Theatre.

A longtime supporter of the George Eastman Museum, Forster was first elected to its board of trustees in 2001 and served as a trustee until 2010, when he was elected as a trustee emeritus.

Rochester, N.Y., October 15, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will open a new rotation in its History of Photography Gallery on October 26, which celebrates contributions by a selection of photographers who immigrated or moved to the United States. Many became naturalized citizens as they recorded their perspectives on an unfamiliar country, and most have become key figures in the history of photography.

Rochester, N.Y., September 25, 2019—After taking a brief intermission that began in July to accommodate construction at the museum, the Dryden Theatre will raise its curtain again on Friday, October 11 at 7:30 p.m. with a screening of The Killing Floor (Bill Duke, 1985). The theater will resume its daytime screenings on October 15, with a recent work by multimedia artist Lena Herzog, Last Whispers—Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree.

Rochester, N.Y., September 20, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has received a grant award of $340,615 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Division of Preservation and Access, Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections program for its Protecting Nitrate Film Heritage project. Grant funding will support the creation of a reliable, safe, and sustainable environment for the museum’s renowned and extremely fragile collection of 35mm nitrate-based film materials housed at the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center in Chili, New York.

Rochester, N.Y., September 6, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will be open to the public for FREE on Saturday, September 21, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. In the spirit of Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day, the Eastman Museum is opening its doors to all visitors for the day to encourage the Rochester community to experience the exhibitions The Art of Warner Brothers Cartoons and Tanya Marcuse: Woven, and the History of Photography Gallery, as well as hands-on activities for all ages in the Discovery Room.

Rochester, N.Y., August 28, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has announced the fall lineup for its Wish You Were Here lecture series. For nearly 20 years, this popular photography lecture series has brought artists and photojournalists to Rochester to share their stories and photographs from around the world. The 2019 series will kick off on Thursday, September 12 at 6 p.m., with photographer Larry McNeil.

Rochester, N.Y., August 27, 2019—The George Eastman Museum and the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, will premiere the first large-scale retrospective of artist Bea Nettles’s fifty-year career this fall. The exhibition, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory, was co-organized by the two institutions and will open at The Sheldon on October 4, and remain on view through December 28. The George Eastman Museum will present the show in Rochester January 31–June 14, 2020.

Rochester, N.Y., August 22, 2019—The Eastman Museum Council will present its Movie on the Lawn event featuring Ratatouille (2007) on Friday, September 6 at 7 p.m. on the north lawn of the George Eastman Museum. In case of rain, the event will be moved to Saturday, September 7.

Rochester, N.Y., August 15, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has received a grant award of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program, to support its project Preserving and Improving Access to the Boyer Collection.

Rochester, N.Y., August 13, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has appointed Peter Bagrov, PhD, as Curator in Charge of its Moving Image Department. He will assume the post on August 16. Bagrov was previously senior curator of Gosfilmofond, the national film archive of Russia, and has nearly twenty years of experience as a film curator and scholar.

Rochester, N.Y., August 6, 2019—This week, the George Eastman Museum will begin a major restoration of the Colonnade of George Eastman’s mansion, a National Historic Landmark.
The Colonnade is the passageway—lined with windows onto the Schuyler C. Townson Terrace Garden—between the Palm House and the dining room in George Eastman’s historic mansion. This structure provides the only interior route between the museum’s main entrance and galleries and the historic mansion and Terrace Garden.

Rochester, N.Y., August 1, 2019—As part of the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival, the George Eastman Museum will host a Hidden Garden Concert on Friday, September 13 at 6 p.m., featuring musicians from several Rochester bands, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Tom Petty's album Wildflowers.

Rochester, N.Y., July 30, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has recently completed a major upgrade to the environmental conditions of its collections areas, with grant support of $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The more than $800,000 Environmental Improvements Implementation project included the replacement of a 30-year-old system that controlled the temperature and humidity for the photography vault, technology vault, and photography study center. 

Rochester, N.Y., July 23, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will present Anderson & Low: Voyages and Discoveries in its main galleries beginning October 18. The exhibition is the US premiere of UK-based artist duo Anderson & Low’s most recent series, Voyages. For this exhibition, the artists also selected works from the Eastman Museum collection that they perceived to resonate with their work.

Rochester, N.Y., July 18, 2019—This Saturday, July 20, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the George Eastman Museum will be celebrating “Moon Day” throughout the day with a special boot camp style photo workshop, a Focus 45 talk, gallery tours, and film screenings.

Rochester, N.Y., June 24, 2019—This summer, the George Eastman Museum will offer visitors a look at the complex process of animation with The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons. The exhibition will be open to the public on June 28 and remain on view through October 6. An exhibition preview will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 27, followed by a screening of Warner Bros. animated shorts at 8 p.m. in the Dryden Theatre.

Rochester, N.Y., June 12, 2019— ESL Federal Credit Union has acquired the naming rights to the new main entrance building—the ESL Federal Credit Union Pavilion—at the George Eastman Museum’s new visitor center. The new entrance will be more convenient, visible, welcoming, and accessible for guests. The visitor center will also include a new café and museum shop. Construction is expected to begin in January 2020 and be completed in July 2020.

Rochester, N.Y., June 7, 2019—The George Eastman Museum announces Tanya Marcuse: Woven is now on view through January 5, 2020. The artist, Tanya Marcuse, will be in Rochester tonight for a conversation with Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography, at 6 p.m. in the Dryden Theatre. Following the conversation, the exhibition gallery will be open to view, and Marcuse will be signing copies of her book, Fruitless / Fallen / Woven (Radius, 2019).

Rochester, N.Y., May 2, 2019—The George Eastman Museum honored Julia Roberts with the George Eastman Award earlier this evening in front of a sold-out crowd. The Eastman Award is the museum’s highest honor in motion pictures and recognizes Robert’s distinguished contribution to the art of film. The award ceremony was held in the Dryden Theatre, where 500 people were in attendance to view a video compilation of her work, followed by her gracious acceptance speech and an on-stage conversation with Roberts and the museum’s Curator of Film Programming, Jared Case.

Rochester, N.Y., April 15, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has announced that its popular Eastman Entertains: At the Movies, will be on view from Tuesday, May 7, through Sunday, May 26. For three weeks only, a spectacular array of creatively styled table settings and floral arrangements inspired by popular motion pictures—including Clue, Hocus Pocus, Mamma Mia, and The Sting—will be displayed throughout the mansion of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman.

Rochester, N.Y., May 16, 2019—The Garden Vibes summer concert series will return to the George Eastman Museum this summer with a condensed schedule in June. A major construction project will begin on the museum’s historic Colonnade in July, limiting access to the Terrace Garden and East Vista. The museum will host the outdoor concerts on June 12 and June 19, prior to commencement of construction.

Rochester, N.Y., May 3, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has released the official program for this weekend’s 5th Nitrate Picture Show, the world’s first festival of film conservation. Following a day of workshops, behind-the-scenes tours, and talks in the Dryden, the 5th Nitrate Picture Show will begin its official film program at 4:30 p.m.

Rochester, N.Y., April 9, 2019—In commemoration of the lives of the victims of the atrocities at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in New Zealand, and in solidarity with Muslim people, the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum will present three films by renowned filmmakers Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Jafar Panahi (Iran), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey). The film series, Salam (“peace” in Arabic) was organized by the Eastman Museum in partnership with the Islamic Center of Rochester, and is sponsored by the William & Sheila Konar Foundation.

Rochester, N.Y., March 28, 2019—This year makes the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. The George Eastman Museum will open a new rotation in its History of Photography Gallery on May 3, which will celebrate the anniversary as well as examine the intersecting histories of photography and space exploration.

Rochester, N.Y., March 12, 2019—The George Eastman Museum has announced that Academy Award winner Julia Roberts will introduce a special screening of Full Frontal (Steven Soderbergh, 2002) at the Dryden Theatre on Wednesday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. Roberts will be in Rochester to accept the George Eastman Award on Thursday, May 2 in front of a sold-out crowd at the Dryden Theatre, and has agreed to introduce the film on May 1.

Rochester, N.Y., February 12, 2019—The George Eastman Museum will honor Julia Roberts with the George Eastman Award on Thursday, May 2. The award recognizes her distinguished contribution to the art of cinema. Tickets will go on sale to the public on March 18 and will be available at eastman.org/eastmanaward2019.

Rochester, N.Y., January 16, 2019—The George Eastman Museum is offering free general admission beginning today and until the end of the government shutdown to all federal employees impacted by the shutdown and their families, including tickets to evening film screenings at the Dryden Theatre.

George Eastman Museum
Tuesday-Saturday: 10 a.m to 5 p.m.
Sunday: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
(Closed Monday)

Dryden Theatre
Tuesday- Saturday: Films begin at 7:30 p.m. (unless otherwise noted); Doors open at 6:45 p.m.