The legacy of actor/director/producer Philip Seymour Hoffman is a  point of pride for those in his hometown, who will soon be able to enjoy a memorial erected in  his honor at George Eastman Museum, outdoors near the Dryden Theatre. On Saturday, May 28,  a bronze life-size sculpture will be unveiled that depicts Hoffman appearing to be walking  toward the movie theater.  

The George Eastman Museum will present the 6th Nitrate Picture Show from June 2 to 5, 2022, at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, NY. The Nitrate Picture Show, the world’s only festival of film conservation, returns after a two-year hiatus for the sixth edition with a new lineup of nitrate prints on screen, the Nitrate Touch workshop, and two concerts on Thursday, June 2: the first on the George Eastman’s grand piano and the second on the Eastman’s Aeolian pipe organ.

—The George Eastman Museum has appointed Jacqueline DiStefano, CPA as Vice President, Finance and Operations. She will be responsible for overseeing the activities of the accounting and finance, human resources, and information technology departments of the museum, as well as the Eastman Museum’s shop and cafe. DiStefano will be succeeding Thomas J. Combs, who is retiring, and will begin in her new role on July 16.

—Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window will be on view at the George Eastman Museum beginning July 7. The exhibition will include artist Gail Albert Halaban’s photographs from the earliest to the most recent phases of her project, which until now has been seen only as discrete bodies of work from New York and Paris. This show features images made in cities all over the world, including Buenos Aires, Istanbul, New York, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Utrecht, and Venice, and showcases what urban neighbors see when they look across the street.

The George Eastman Museum has hired Katie Kalkstein as its Director of Annual Giving. Kalkstein will be responsible for managing the museum’s individual and corporate memberships as well as managing the museum’s annual fund campaign.

The George Eastman Museum is hosting a community forum on Wednesday, May 16, at 6 p.m., to share information about its historic mansion restoration program and update community members about the next phase.

The George Eastman Museum will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Animal House (Landis, US 1978) with a screening of a 35mm print of the film on Saturday, July 7 at 7:30 p.m. The film’s director, John Landis, and its costume designer, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, will introduce the film and, after the screening, will share stories and insights about the making of this classic.

—The Garden Vibes summer concert series will return to the George Eastman Museum this summer. The outdoor concerts will take place on the following Wednesday evenings: June 20, July 18, and August 15.

The George Eastman Museum has released the official program for this weekend’s 4th 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 4th Nitrate Picture Show will begin its official program at 4:30 p.m. today with a series of six short nitrate films, followed by  Sommarlek  (Summer Interlude, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1951) at 7:30 p.m., and conclude the day with Holiday (George Cukor, US 1938), starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, at 10 p.m.

—The George Eastman Museum has announced that its popular Eastman Entertains: At the Movies, will be on view from Tuesday, May 8, through Sunday, May 20. For two weeks only, a spectacular array of creatively styled table settings and floral arrangements inspired by popular motion pictures—including My Fair Lady, A League of Their Own, Steel Magnolias, and The Goonies—will be displayed throughout the mansion of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman.

In anticipation of the 4th Nitrate Picture Show, the George Eastman Museum will host a special pre-festival event with a screening of a rare nitrate print of Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, UK 1948) on Thursday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m. The film is on loan from the Library of Congress. The 4th Nitrate Picture Show will officially begin at 9 a.m. on Friday, May 4, when the full program of film titles to be shown at the festival will be announced.  

The George Eastman Museum has acquired a large and comprehensive collection of photographs by David Levinthal as a result of donations from an anonymous patron and from Donald Rosenfeld Jr. The museum is now the most significant repository of Levinthal’s art in the world. The Eastman Museum will premiere the retrospective David Levinthal: War, Myth, Desire on June 2, 2018. The exhibition will run through December 30, 2018.

The George Eastman Museum will be celebrating the 90th Academy Awards with a 23-film series at the Dryden through April, a special event with Jack Garner on February 16 discussing his award winner predictions, and a day of past Best Picture winners screening at Kodak Center on March 3.

The George Eastman Museum brings springtime to Rochester a few months early, with the annual Dutch Connection floral show, on view Friday, February 9, through Sunday, February 25. This colorful two-week display features thousands of flowering bulbs in George Eastman’s historic mansion.

Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema will open at the George Eastman Museum on January 13. Dreaming in Color is dedicated to a unique collection of more than 23,000 original nitrate frames of 35mm films dating from the early years of cinema (1897–1915). The frames were gathered by Italian film historian Davide Turconi (1911–2005) in the 1960s from a large collection of films acquired by Jesuit priest Josef-Alexis Joye (1852–1919).

George Eastman House announced today the official launch of its completed Photographic Process Videos project. The video series was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services Museums for America Program. The complete series can be found on the museum's YouTube channel.

The University of Rochester and George Eastman House will jointly offer a new master’s degree in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management (PPCM) beginning in the fall of 2014. The program will be the only one in the United States dedicated to the study of the photograph as an object (the care and handling of photographs) as well as the related academic study of images (theoretical and historical context). Enrollment begins this month, with the first students beginning their courses in fall 2014.

George Eastman House has received a federal grant for its project, Opening Up Collections: Charting Technicolor’s History through New Technologies, in the amount of $48,254 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Museums for America Program. George Eastman House is one of 186 museums across the nation to be awarded the IMLS grant out of 707 that applied for funding.

George Eastman House has received a $32,000 grant for its History Through the Lens of Photography educational program from the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation—“Engaging the Next Generation” initiative.

George Eastman House has received a grant from the Rochester Area Community Foundation in the amount of $40,000 to support the exhibition Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project, which opened on Saturday, November 1 and will run through January 25, 2015.

George Eastman House announced today the launch of The Nitrate Picture Show, the world’s first archival festival of film conservation, showcasing vintage 35mm nitrate film prints made from the beginnings of cinema to the early 1950s. The inaugural edition of The Nitrate Picture Show: A Festival of Film Conservation will be held May 1–3, 2015 at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House’s historic venue for film exhibition in Rochester, NY. The Dryden Theatre—one of only a few archival venues in the world that can project nitrate film—is home to the museum’s ongoing program of past and present cinematic works from all countries.

George Eastman House welcomes two visiting artists on Thursday, October 23—photographer David Pace and filmmaker Siegfried Kühn. Pace will be speaking as part of the museum’s Wish You Were Here lecture series at 6 p.m. in the Dryden Theatre. In a separate event, at 8 p.m., Kühn will be introducing his film Childhood before its screening in the Dryden, followed by a discussion with Eastman School of Music professor, Reinhild Steingröver.

Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project—organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art—makes its debut at George Eastman House on November 1. Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project is a reflection on the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. This event resulted in the deaths of six African American adolescents, some of the youngest victims of the Civil Rights Movement: Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14), who were in the church at the time of the bombing, and Virgil Ware (13) and Johnny Robinson (16), who lost their lives as a result of the ensuing violence. The exhibition will be on view in the museum’s Project Gallery through January 25, 2015.

George Eastman House has dedicated its new History of Photography Gallery to rotating installations that trace photography’s historical path to the present through photographs and cameras from the museum’s collection. The gallery opened in May and the second rotation of photographs from its collection will be on display beginning Saturday, October 4. This installation of photographs was curated but Joe Struble, collection manager in the Department of Photography at George Eastman House.

George Eastman House announced today that it will operate a digital laboratory as part of its Moving Image Department, thanks to Eastman Kodak Company’s donation of state-of-the-art digital equipment. The gift will enhance George Eastman House’s in-house capabilities in film preservation, allowing broader access to the museum’s motion picture collection. The lab will be used for both digitizing select titles from the museum’s premier collection of more than 28,000 films, as well as preserving digitally-born works.

George Eastman House announced today that it will operate a digital laboratory as part of its Moving Image Department, thanks to Eastman Kodak Company’s donation of state-of-the-art digital equipment. The gift will enhance George Eastman House’s in-house capabilities in film preservation, allowing broader access to the museum’s motion picture collection. The lab will be used for both digitizing select titles from the museum’s premier collection of more than 28,000 films, as well as preserving digitally-born works.

George Eastman House announced today that Jurij Meden will join its Moving Image Department as curator of film exhibitions. Meden comes to Eastman House after serving as head of the film programming department at the Slovenska Kinoteka—a member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)—in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Meden will start in his new role with George Eastman House this fall and will be responsible for developing and managing the film and media programming for the Dryden Theatre and other exhibition spaces at the museum.

For decades, Rochester was known as the imaging capital of the world. Innovation and invention by Rochester companies paved the way for the world we now live in, from medical testing to space exploration, digital capture and transmission, and more. On September 20, George Eastman House will open Innovation in the Imaging Capital, which highlights Rochester’s major contributions to the imaging story, showing technology made possible by inventions that were originated or developed locally.

George Eastman House will open the exhibition Robert Burley: The Disappearance of Darkness on September 20. The exhibition examines both the dramatic and historical demise of film-manufacturing facilities and industrial darkrooms on an international scale, including corporations such as Kodak, Agfa-Gevaert, and Ilford. It documents the impact of the emergence of digital imaging technologies, which irrevocably changed photography and led to the abrupt and rapid breakdown of a century-old industry that embodied the medium’s material culture. The exhibition will be on view in the museum’s special exhibition galleries through January 4, 2015.

In conjunction with his exhibition at ARTISANworks, photographer Wayne Martin Belger will be speaking at George Eastman House on September 4 at 6:00 p.m. Belger will be discussing his unique pinhole cameras and their intimate connection to the photographs he makes.

The Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House is bringing Dutch Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer to Rochester on September 3, 2104. De Heer will host a discussion about his own work and the experience of moviemaking in Australia’s Northern Territory, following the Rochester premiere of his film, The Tracker (2002).

George Eastman House has achieved reaccreditation by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). The highest national recognition for a museum, accreditation signifies an institution’s excellence to the museum community, governments, funders, outside agencies, and the public. Out of the more than 35,000 museums in the country, George Eastman House is a part of the three percent that are accredited.

George Eastman House has announced the appointment of Steven L. Schwartz, president and CEO of Tennis Corporation of America (TCA), based in Chicago, Illinois, as the new chair of its Board of Trustees.