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Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Fourteen years ago, I made Rita Dove: An American Poet, a biographical film that captured something essential about one of America's most important voices. You can watch the documentary below. Now, as Rita and I prepare to embark on a new cinematic journey exploring her epic poem Sonata Mulattica, I find myself revisiting that first collaboration—not out of nostalgia, but to understand who we were then, what we captured, and how far we've traveled since.

Poet Rita Dove's visit to George Bridgetower's catacombs inspires a new documentary exploring the forgotten violinist who once performed with Beethoven. Poet Rita Dove once descended into a London catacombs to pay respects to George Bridgetower, the brilliant violinist whose collaboration with Beethoven has been largely erased from history. Her pilgrimage, recount

I find myself trapped in 1898, not by choice but by some strange force, as if the year itself were a lucid dream from which I cannot—or perhaps do not wish to—wake. Every path of research leads back to this temporal crossroads, this pivot point where centuries collide in the most unlikely symphony of events.

On a February evening in 1913, New York’s bohemian elite gathered at Tiffany Studios for one of the most dazzling spectacles the city had ever seen. The New York Times reported breathlessly on the event, describing it as an “Egyptian fête” held in a “riot of color.”

Explore Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass windows in their original settings with Tiffany in the Wild. At Woodlawn Cemetery in New York and other historic sites across the United States and Havana’s Colón Cemetery, Tiffany’s opalescent glass transforms mausoleums into living museums of light and memory. From Woodlawn’s Belmont, Woolworth, and Gould mausoleums to the Lewis Ginter Mausoleum in Richmond, these radiant works reveal the collaboration of architects, sculptors,

Tiffany in the Wild: La Habana is both a search and a testament. A search for what remains, and a testament to what endures despite the passage of time and the weight of history. My hope is to share these rare survivals before they vanish from the living world, to let audiences see and hear Tiffany as I first did — in the wild.

Between 1898 and 1933—spanning thirty-five years until Tiffany's death—Arlington Street Church commissioned what would become the largest collection of single-themed Tiffany windows in the world. Sixteen magnificent panels, conceived and executed as a unified narrative, demonstrate what becomes possible when patronage extends beyond individual commissions to embrace a complete artistic vision.

In the 1880s, Louis Comfort Tiffany lokking at this 700-year-old tradition would asked: “What if we could bring this magic into people’s daily lives, and into their homes?” The question lead Tiffany to reimagined the medieval trinity for a new world.

While The Official Story reduces the experience of state terror to a moral fable with clear heroes and villains, I'm Still Here creates space for the ambiguous, bureaucratic horror that characterized the Brazilian military regime, ultimately providing a more profound engagement with historical memory.

“The Art of Joy Brown” Selected for Competition at 2025 Mystic Film Festival.

Throughout the film, Montes-Bradley weaves personal archival materials, interviews, and on-location filming with understated sensitivity. We see Lankes’s legacy not only through his prints but also through the memories of scholars, collectors, and descendants who help reconstruct the arc of his life—from Buffalo to Europe, from Vermont to Virginia.

A Buffalo Sunday newspaper article from the late 19th century offers a vivid account of the premiere of Niagara…

Samba on your Feet is a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley | To experience samba and Carnaval is to immerse oneself in a living history.

The Papers of Daniel Chester French

The Piccirilli Factor at The Met

Back in Charlottesville, I eagerly began editing the footage captured last week in New York with Lisa Ackerman and John Belardo.

The filmcaptures the indomitable spirit of these individuals, from the shores of Guam to the raising of the American Flag in Iwo Jima.

Join us for a look into the work we're creating in the Editing Room. In this brief excerpt from the sequences pertaining to The City Beautif

I am struck by the enduring presence of many of the statues from their era, each competing for the ever-shrinking space…