About

Kirsten Larvick is a preservationist, producer, and cultural strategist who works to protect and sustain moving image history through restoration, legacy planning, and archival access. She develops frameworks that support independent film legacies—connecting grantmaking, institutional partnerships, and public programming to ensure these works remain discoverable and valued.

As Managing Director at IndieCollect, Kirsten oversees restoration, archiving, and exhibition initiatives that center independent filmmakers and advance the organization’s mission to restore and activate film heritage. She co-develops funding strategies, cross-sector collaborations, secures grants, consults on estate planning, and helps place film collections with partner archives. She works closely with artist filmmakers on key collection assessments, restoration projects and contributes to IndieCollect’s national programming designed to broaden public access.

Her leadership extends beyond staff roles. She co-chairs the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television, where she serves on the Grant Selection Committee, helps shape policy, reviews proposals, raises funds, and advocates for the preservation of culturally vital works by women directors. Kirsten is also the founding director of the Al Larvick Fund, a nonprofit that supports the digitization and public access of home movies through grants, documentation, and curated screenings.

Kirsten’s work combines project-level production with systems-level strategy. She has served on state arts funding panels, advised individual artists and estates, and helped build sustainable frameworks that link preservation to public engagement, equity, and access.

As an independent producer and consultant, Kirsten collaborates with filmmakers on restoration and archival strategies. Recent projects as Restoration Producer include One Hand Don’t Clap (1988), Wild at Art (1995), and Building Bombs (1990). Her curatorial work has appeared at institutions such as Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, UnionDocs, Metrograph, the City Reliquary Museum in New York, and the Barbican in London. She has also produced and presented film and multimedia exhibitions, and preservation events at festivals, libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and community centers across the U.S. and internationally.

Since 2022, she has served on the Board of Directors at UnionDocs, a Queens-based center for documentary art that unites makers from around the world. She has been a two-term panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts’ Individual Artist Program for Film, Media & New Technology.

Rooted in a background in documentary production, her early work includes research, editing, and outreach roles on Look at Us Now Mother, Bettie Page Reveals All, Singers in the Band, and Young Lakota. In her own creative practice, she continues to explore themes of time, identity inheritance, and mortality—constructing narratives through analog materials, personal archives, and everyday ephemera.

@kirsten_studio

#regionalfilmmaking #womeninfilm #documentaryarts #archivalarts #feministfilm #handmadecinema #culturalmemory #preservation #savecinema