Jon Gartenberg is President of Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME). His company restores and distributes libraries of classic and avant-garde films, and archives of publishing and photographic assets.

For 18 years he worked as a curator in the film archive of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he acquired, catalogued, and preserved films for the permanent collection. His signature projects include restoring the films of Andy Warhol and editing the published catalog of MOMA’s archival film collection.

On an international level, Gartenberg has curated numerous film exhibitions, lectured extensively, and written many articles relating to film history and archiving, ranging in subject from D.W. Griffith to experimental cinema. Active in the International Federation of Film Archives, Gartenberg was a member of its Cataloguing Commission from 1982-1991.

Following his career in the cultural sector, Gartenberg entered the business world, working at Broadway Video Entertainment and then at Golden Books Family Entertainment. He refurbished libraries of “B” movies and classic American television shows such as Saturday Night Live, Underdog, Lassie, and the Lone Ranger, for both international home video distribution and television broadcast. He also assembled extensive accompanying libraries of production records, film stills, scripts, and merchandising memorabilia. At Golden Books, he developed a comprehensive plan for modernizing the storage and access to a unique archive of published books, original artwork, and prepress film.

Currently, Gartenberg’s own company, Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) identifies, recovers, and disseminates libraries of moving images for a variety of clients. These clients range from film archives to commercial entities, and from celebrity personalities to avant-garde filmmakers. Through this process, GME uniquely enhances the value of these intellectual property assets. Among other projects, GME has consulted with the Nederlands Filmmuseum on their vast collection of American film holdings, with Steeplechase Films on their vintage collection of footage of New York City, as well as with corporations that possess warehouses of classic feature films and documentaries. In addition, GME continues to archive moving image works of experimental artists.

GME has also been involved in reviving the publishing assets of schools and educational institutions, including the Bank Street College of Education, which also resulted in the recovery of significant amounts of unpaid royalties. GME has also developed and implemented a project to catalogue and digitize the historic photo and document archives of the Spence School.

Gartenberg was the Program Director for the Film Preservation Project of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. In this capacity he produced the completion of the final film of experimental filmmaker Warren Sonbert, entitled Whiplash, which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1997. He guest curated a career retrospective exhibition of this filmmaker at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1999), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (2000), the Beaubourg Museum in Paris (2002), and the Vienna Filmmuseum (2005).

Gartenberg was a juror on the Faces of Love film festival in Moscow (2000) and worked as a consultant on the Allan Dwan retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival (2002). Since 2003, has has been a programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival, collaborating on the section of Restored & Rediscovered films, as well as curating a strong representation of independent and experimental works, a number of which have garnered festival prizes. He also advises cutting-edge filmmakers on the economics of experimental film distribution and exhibition, and has recently authored an article about this subject (“The Fragile Emotion”) for the book entitled Swimming Upstream (2008).

GME actively distributes DVDs of both classic international movies and experimental films and to the educational and library market. In a production capacity, Gartenberg has served as an archival consultant on various film projects, and GME has licensed clips from avant-garde artists’ works for television productions, including PBS documentaries on Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and the history of New York.

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