Laurel Day

Background

About Laurel Day

My journey began in June 2016. I had just been accepted as a transfer into the University of Texas’ Radio-Television-Film undergraduate program but was unsure what to do with my degree. I simply knew that I loved learning the history of filmmaking and telling stories about various productions. My uncertainty changed following a live piano screening of G.W Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl at Austin Film Society, where I learned that approximately 90% of films made before 1930 remain lost. As a result, I tailored my coursework and internships around pursuing a career in film preservation and programming. My name is Laurel Day, and I am a recent graduate from Ryerson University’s Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management M.A. Program. My five years’ experience of interning, volunteering, and researching in libraries, archives, and museums has provided me with the skills necessary to catalog, conserve, and digitize films of various gauges and genres, including amateur and orphan cinema. While my thesis focused on Polish educational films from the Communist era, my background in American and Canadian historical archives and film sleuthing provides me with the knowledge and adaptability to work in many specialized settings.