NEW YORK, Oct. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The Museum of Modern Art announces that La Frances Hui will join the Museum as Associate Curator in the Department of Film, beginning October 13. In this role, Ms. Hui will serve as a strategic collaborator in driving the department's extensive calendar of programs, exhibitions, collections and scholarship under the leadership of Rajendra Roy, the Museum's Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film. She joins MoMA following 15 years at the Asia Society in New York, where she served as Film Curator and Associate Director of Cultural Programs. During her tenure, she curated film series covering a wide spectrum of Chinese cinema, from silent classics to propaganda films to contemporary mainstream cinema and independent films. With expertise in a variety of Asian cinemas, she has also organized series featuring Japanese documentaries, New Wave Japanese cinema, contemporary Thai films, New Wave Iranian cinema, and popular Korean filmmaking.
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"MoMA's commitment to cinema has always extended beyond North American centers of production to include work from innovative international filmmakers," said Mr. Roy. "La's rich knowledge of Asian cinema, combined with her unique professional experience in program development and implementation, will afford us with critical opportunities to engage with a spectrum of moving image artists in ever more essential ways."
At Asia Society, Ms. Hui presented retrospectives of directors Tsai Ming-Liang, Jafar Panahi, Midi Z, and Shohei Imamura. In addition, she curated a series of independent Chinese documentaries for Film Southasia, Kathmandu and was co-curator of the 36th Asian American International Film Festival (2013), a festival dedicated to Asian and Asian American film and media.
The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film marks its 80th anniversary in 2015. Founded in 1935 as the Film Library, it holds one of the strongest international collections of motion pictures in the world—totaling more than 30,000 films between the permanent and study collections—and is a leader in film preservation and a discoverer of emerging talent. Playing an essential role in MoMA's mission to collect, preserve, and exhibit modern and contemporary art, the Department of Film was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1978 "for the contribution it has made to the public's perception of movies as an art form."
