Secretary/Chief Financial Officer
Melissa Dollman (see “About” page)
Chief Executive Officer
Devin Orgeron (see “About” page)
Board of Directors
Jessica Cebra
Jessica Cebra is an archivist and visual artist living in Palm Springs, her hometown. She is currently a descriptive metadata management librarian for the Stanford Digital Repository at Stanford Libraries. Jessica previously processed physical and digital archival collections of fieldwork notebooks, photographs, drawings, and films in the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. She studied Fine Art at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, Library Science and Historic Preservation at University of Maryland, and Business Administration at Bay Atlantic University (Washington, D.C.). Jessica also helps her family run the Sakura Inn in Palm Springs.
Brian Drischell
Brian Drischell is a graduate of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program (’05). A lifelong cineaste, Drischell has worked in film exhibition and archiving for 25 years. His interest in home movies developed while attending UCLA and he subsequently volunteered at Home Movie Day for a total of 17 years. His own family home movies surfaced from his father’s attic a few years ago and are now safely preserved. Drischell has recently relocated to Seattle, WA after working at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles for 18 years. He is currently the Visual Resources Archivist at Providence Archives in West Seattle.
Adam Hart
Adam Charles Hart is the author of Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media (Oxford UP, 2019) and the upcoming monographs The Living Camera: The History, Theory, and Politics of Handheld Cinematography (Oxford UP) and Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero (Oxford UP, 2024). He received his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago and has taught at Harvard, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He is the curator of the Guerrilla Television Project for the Media Burn Archive.
Sean Savage
Sean Savage received a MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University and fell hard for industrial films and home movies with his first job in the field at Northeast Historic Film. He served a long tenure as Senior Film Archivist at the Academy Film Archive and is currently an Asset Management Specialist for Iron Mountain reporting to Paramount Archives. He’s been a sporadic contributor to The Moving Image journal and has presented on home movies and other subjects for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Association of Moving Image Archivists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orphan Film Symposium and more.
Interns, Graduate Students, and Volunteers
Rio Maropis (Volunteer 2024-2025)
Rio Maropis grew up in western Pennsylvania and now lives on the central coast of California. She works at the UC Santa Barbara Library and hopes to pursue a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) with a focus on community archives.
Janeth Delgado (Intern Summer 2024)
Janeth Delgado is a recent graduate from San Jose State University’s Master of Library and Information Science program. She previously worked as an intern at the American Film Institute’s (AFI) archive located in Los Angeles, helping them develop their database of audio and video recordings created by the AFI Conservatory. Her work with the AFI sparked an interest in the audiovisual field and a desire to learn more about digital film cataloging and preservation. In her time with Deserted Films she has gained a better understanding of descriptive cataloging and increasing discoverability for home movies and amateur films. With her undergraduate background in computer science, she is interested in learning more about the technical aspects of digitization, audiovisual preservation, and metadata standards.
Gabz Norte, Jackie Forsyte, and Daniella D’Acquisto (Fall 2023)
While UCLA Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) grad students Jackie Forsyte, Gabrielle/Gabz Norte, and Daniella D’Acquisto, inspected, cleaned, and digitized a selection of films by amateur filmmaker Betty Stefenel (Jan. 2, 1913 – Aug. 1980). Read more about them on our Events & News page.
UCLA Master of Library and Information Science students in Janet Ceja’s “IS289-3 “Special Issues in Information Studies: Motion Picture Film Preservation” course. (Fall 2022)
Felicity Flesher, Jeremy Hendrickson, Michaela Telfer, Christina Scholze, Daniella D’acquisto, Kylie Marie Harris, Marisa Rae Pimentel, Eunice Hong, Karl Theopold, Emily Gudmundson, Grace Lauren, Sidney Garcia, and Tatiana Hernandez digitized around ten of our films! (under supervision by Dr. Janet Ceja, Dr. Shawn VanCour, and Chloe Reyes/UCLA’s Media Preservation Lab.)
Former Board Members
Jennifer Jenkins
Jennifer Jenkins (MLIS, Ph.D.) is Professor and Research Social Scientist in the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona (UA).