What is the Women Film Pioneers Project?
The Pioneers project began as a collaborative effort to advance research on the accomplishments and history of women filmmakers from the early years of cinema through to the coming of sound. The original emphasis was on directors, writers, and producers. Recently, the project has expanded to include editors, exhibitors, publicists, and others working in the early years. The interest in directors, writers, and producers has been linked to a large archival project inspired by the need to discover, restore, preserve, exhibit, and distribute extant 35mm films. However, this emphasis does not exclude the parallel interest in women audiences in the silent period. A managed email list is maintained for communications and the group meets annually at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference. A series of conferences is evolving. After the first conference meeting in October, 1999, at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, “Women and the Silent Screen” was held in November, 2001 at the Un
