Rochelle Slovin is an actress, and Founding Director of Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York City, which she led for 30 years, from 1981 until 2011. [1] A native New Yorker, Slovin was educated at Cornell University and the Columbia Business School. [2] She began her career in the 1960s as a performer in New York’s avant-garde theater, appearing often at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and other off-off-Broadway venues. [3]
The Museum of the Moving Image is a media museum located in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios, in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the American Museum of the Moving Image. The museum began a $67 million expansion in March 2008 and reopened in January 2011. The expansion was designed by architect Thomas Leeser.
Cornell University is a private and statutory Ivy League research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's founding principle, a popular 1868 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
Columbia Business School (CBS) is the business school of Columbia University in the City of New York in Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1916, Columbia Business School is one of the oldest business schools in the world. It is one of six Ivy League business schools, and has been referred to as among the most selective of top business schools.
Slovin has lectured internationally on museum planning, exhibition philosophy, and the use of audiovisual media in museums. She is a former chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, a member of the Board of Directors of The Wooster Group, and currently serves on the President’s Council of Cornell Women. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the philosopher Edmund Leites. [4] [5]
The Cultural Institutions Group is a coalition of institutions providing cultural and educational resources to the public in New York City that are subsidized by the city. The group originated in the last quarter of the 19th century with planning efforts by New York City to cope with becoming a major city. In the mid 20th century, the institutions first joined together to negotiate with the workers' unions, but continued as they had found a valuable community of interests.
The Wooster Group is a New York City-based experimental theater company known for creating numerous original dramatic works. It gradually emerged from Richard Schechner's The Performance Group (1967–1980) during the period from 1975 to 1980, and took its name in 1980; the independent productions of 1975–1980 are retroactively attributed to the Group.
On January 26, 2015, Slovin portrayed Holocaust refugee Maria Altmann in the stage version of the memoir The Accidental Caregiver by Gregor Collins, which premiered at the Robert Moss Theater in New York City. [6] Slovin also played Altmann in a staged reading at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on June 25, 2015, opposite Actor Christian Scheider. [7] [8]
Maria Altmann was an Austrian-American Jewish refugee from Austria, who fled her home country after it was occupied by the Nazis. She is noted for her ultimately successful legal campaign to reclaim from the Government of Austria five family-owned paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt which were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann is a 2012 memoir by Gregor Collins, recounting the three years he was a caregiver for Maria Altmann, as well as a stageplay, which premiered at the Robert Moss Theater in New York City on January 26, 2015.
Gregor Collins is an American author, actor, speaker and contributor, best known for playing Matt in the mumblecore film Goodbye Promise, and for writing the memoir The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann. He lives and works in New York.
