P. Adams Sitney is a preeminent film theorist and historian of European and American avant-garde film and Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University. Known for his early intellectual and critical support of the New American Cinema movement, he wrote Visionary Film (Oxford University Press, 1974), widely regarded as the first major history of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking. The author of Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2009), Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (University of Texas Press, 1995), and Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1992), he has also edited several essay collections on filmography. Sitney was an important figure in the early years of New York University’s doctoral program in Cinema Studies, which was established in 1970. He was a founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and has served as a member of its Essential Cinema film selection committee.
