On Monday, Tabitha Jackson, former director of the Sundance Film Festival, officially took over as director of Film Forum, the four-screen nonprofit arthouse at the edge of Greenwich Village. The move reunites a veteran programmer with a neighborhood theater she has frequented for decades and hands a local cultural anchor to someone widely known for championing documentaries and repertory programming. For Film Forum regulars, the headline may be big, but the real story is what this means for the theater’s daily slate of films and community events.
From Sundance To The Village
Jackson brings more than 30 years in independent and nonprofit media, including six years at the helm of the Sundance Institute’s documentary program and a two-year stint as director of the Sundance Film Festival. According to Screen Daily, she spent the last two years in research fellowships at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, and she also completed a Rockefeller Foundation residency. It is the kind of résumé that tends to make film programmers nod appreciatively.
A Local Who Calls It Home
Jackson is not just dropping in from the festival circuit. She first started going to Film Forum in the 1990s and now lives nearby with her wife, documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. Speaking with The New York Times, she framed her new job less as a takeover than a stewardship. “There’s a history here. I think that’s why people come,” she said, adding that keeping the theater’s mission intact is at the top of her to-do list.
Steadying A Storied Institution
Film Forum has been quietly navigating a period of change in the corner office. Longtime director Karen Cooper stepped down in 2023 after roughly five decades in charge, and her successor, Sonya Chung, left the role last year. That churn prompted the board to mount a national search for a new leader. Screen Daily reports that board chair Gray Coleman and other trustees pointed to Jackson’s programming record and her roots in the neighborhood as key reasons she got the nod.
What Audiences Should Watch For
Film Forum, a four-screen nonprofit cinema that has hosted premieres, retrospectives and repertory series since 1970, pulls in a devoted following and about a quarter-million admissions a year. As Wikipedia notes, it has long been a crucial fixture in New York’s film ecosystem. Jackson’s insistence on protecting the mission suggests that repertory staples, filmmaker Q&As and documentary premieres will stay at the heart of the schedule. Given her background in commissioning and festival curation, there is also room for careful experiments that try to grow the audience without giving longtime patrons a reason to grumble.
“The most important thing is to make sure that Film Forum continues its mission,” Jackson told The New York Times. For neighbors who treat the theater like a second living room, and for filmmakers who rely on it for premieres and restorations, that promise is likely to be the first and simplest measure of how her tenure begins.
