Rick Prelinger
Archivist, writer, lecturer and filmmaker Rick Prelinger founded Prelinger Archives in 1982 in New York. At its peak, the archives held over 60,000 ephemeral (advertising, industrial, educational, documentary and amateur) films and over 50,000 cans of unedited footage. The core film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,100 key films available online for researchers, scholars, mediamakers and the public to view and reuse without charge. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded an appropriation-friendly research library in 2002, which is currently open to the public in San Francisco. He is a long-time advocate of increased public access to archives and cultural material, and frequently writes and lectures in this field. His longform films include Panorama Ephemera (2004), Lost Landscapes of Detroit (2010) and The Lives of Energy (2010-11), among others. He is currently in pre-production on No More Road Trips, a feature-length exploration of “peak travel” and our fascination with tourism and the road.
