Ian Christie
biography
Ian Christie joined the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media in Autumn 1999, as Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History, having previously been Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent (1997-9) and Visiting Lecturer in Film at Oxford University (1995-8). Earlier, he worked at the British Film Institute from 1976-96 in various capacities, as head of Distribution, Exhibition, Video Publishing and, finally, Special Projects. This last involved co-producing a television series on early cinema for BBC2, The Last Machine presented by Terry Gilliam (1995); and co-curating an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Spellbound: Art and Film (1996), which included work by Gilliam, Greenaway and two subsequent Turner Prize winners, Douglas Gordon and Steve McQueen. He advised on the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World at the V&A in 2006 and in the same year was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University. Director of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, with its headquarters at Birkbeck, from 2003-05, he also directed its London Project and is currently director of the London Screen Study Collection, housed in Birkbeck's new Centre for Film and Visual Media Research.