Biography

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Cynthia Close
Boston
Executive Director - film distributor - writer
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Title/Occupation:  Distributor 
Gender: Female
Race: Caucasian/White
Citizenship: American
Languages Spoken: Germany, English, a little Spanish

Brief Message to Members: Check out my latest book review of Shaking the Money Tree in the summer issue of DOCUMENTARY.
Biography: Since 1993 Cynthia Close has been the Executive Director and currently is acting President of Documentary Educational Resources, (DER) a Watertown Massachusetts based non-profit film and video production/distribution company founded in 1968. DER distributes over 900 titles worldwide.

Cynthia serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Margaret Mead International Film and Video Festival, NYC. She is on the Advisory Board of Women In Film and Video New England Chapter, The Camden International Film Festival, ARTVISION, INC., The Do It Your Damn Self Film Festival and AmericanInsight, Inc.

She currently is acting as fiscal sponsor for over 40 documentary projects in production. Cynthia has taught courses in Funding and Selling the Documentary at the Maine International Film and Television Workshops and a course in the History of Ethnographic Film at the University of Vermont. She has been a guest lecturer at the Boston University Program in Digital Media Arts; Suffolk University, Boston; Emerson College, Harvard University & Lesley University, Cambridge; Temple University, Philadelphia, Primary Source, Boston; and the University of New Mexico, Center for Documentary Film.

She programmed and sponsored film retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC. She has curated and presented programs at film festivals in Boston and New York; Taipei, Taiwan; Tartu, Estonia; and Paris, France. She reviews book manuscripts on documentary film for Focal Press - a branch of Elsevier Publishing and is a book reviewer for the magazine DOCUMENTARY, published by the International Documentary Association.

She has juried the documentary awards for the Chicago International Film Festival and served as a panelist at the 2007 SILVERDOCS Forum and the Woods Hole Film Festival. She was a juror and sponsor for the Doc Challenge at the 2009 and 2010 HOTDOCS Film Festival in Toronto. She was an invited panelist and presenter at HOTDOCS 2009 and 2010 and at CPH:DOX 2009 in Copenhagen and the 2008 Alcance Film Festival, Cadiz, Spain.

Prior to her involvement with film she lived in Germany, working as a corporate Art Consultant and in the 1980’s was Dean of Admissions at the Art Institute of Boston. Her first career was as an artist and instructor in drawing and painting at Boston University and the Art Institute of Boston. She has a BFA and MFA degree from Boston University. She has published articles in media magazines including DOCUMENTARY, THE INDEPENDENT, IMAGINE, NewEnglandFilm.com and is a contributor to THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEW ENGLAND. She has been a blogger since 2003.