About me
Robert Byrne is film preservationist and restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. Working with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations and resurrections of more than forty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums. He is co-author of FIAF Image Restoration, Manipulation, Treatment, and Ethics and publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation. His work appears in the volume Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, and he is co-author of Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896–1901) and Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents. Rob holds a MA in Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image from University of Amsterdam. He has served on the boards of the Global Film Initiative, Friends of the Oakland Fox Theatre, and the Castro Theatre Conservancy, and for more than twenty years has served on the board of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. He has recently founded the San Francisco Film Preserve, a nonprofit organization focused on restoring, preserving, and providing access to cinematic treasures across all generations.
