Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. She is also codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies;  coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories and coeditor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema. She has published over 200 scholarly research articles and essays on film history and historiography, documentary and experimental works, amateur film,  media political economy, and digital culture in Screen, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, and The Moving Image. She has lectured in China, Nigeria, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Turkey, Mexico, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Latvia, France, Wales, Russia, the Netherlands, England,  Germany and the US. She has held endowed chair appointments as the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.