Bryony Dixon

Bryony is curator with responsibility for the BFI National Archive’s extensive silent film collection. She has researched and written on many aspects of early and silent film, as well as programming for a variety of specialist film festivals and events worldwide including the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival, the Berlinale, MoMA, and the BFI London Film Festival. She also regularly contributes to BFI Southbank seasons and events and has co-directed the annual British Silent Film Festival with Laraine Porter for 16 years.

She programmes and gives papers at academic conferences on film and organised the first International Charles Chaplin Conference in 2005 as part of the BFI’s Chaplin Project. She’s also part of the Women and Film History International project. Her book 100 Silent Films, in the BFI Screen Guides series, was published in 2011. Bryony was lead curator on the BFI’s 2012 Silent Hitchcock project, and major silent film restorations including Underground, The Great White Silence and The First-Born.
 
She is a regular interviewee for the media on silent film matters and has appeared on Today, The Film Programme, Night Waves, Silent Britain and Blue Peter. She has contributed essays and notes for BFI DVD projects including Chaplin at Keystone, The Great White Silence, I Was Born But…, Molly Dineen, Tales from the Shipyard, the GPO series, Wonderful London, and Pathé Fairy films. Writings include essays in British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (2003), Slapstick Comedy (2009), Chaplin’s Limelight and the Music Hall Tradition (2006), and magazines and journals such as Sight & Sound, FIAF Journal of Film Preservation and Early Popular Visual Culture.