Profile
Leo Goldsmith is a writer, critic, and curator, whose research takes a transdisciplinary approach to experimental nonfiction forms in moving-image media.
He is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, where he teaches courses in Screen Studies, and has lectured on media, film, and art history at CUNY/Brooklyn College, New York University, and Harvard University. His critical writing appears in 4 Columns, e-flux, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), by Robert Stam with Richard Porton, and is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins (Verso). He is a programming advisor to the selection committee of the New York Film Festival.
Degrees Held
Ph.D., New York University, Department of Cinema Studies (2018); Dissertation: “Fragmented Screens: Found Footage and Image Circulation.”
Recent Publications
Books
Distant Present: The Radical Art and Ideas of Peter Watkins (Verso; under contract); awarded the Art Writers Grant (Book) from Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics, by Robert Stam with Richard Porton and Leo Goldsmith (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)
Book Chapters
“The Artists’ Hands: Tactility and Telepathy in Gianikian & Ricci Lucchi’s Films” in Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi at Work, ed. Alo Paistik and Jonathan Larcher. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2025)
“A Big Ball of Concrete: On Sound in the Work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” in HOMES— Apichatpong Weerastehakul, ed. Antoine Thirion. (Montreuil, France: Les Éditions de l'Œil, forthcoming 2024)
“Underground Cinemas: Histories and Futures” in Under the Ground / Imaginaries for the Subterranean Worlds, ed. Hugo de Almeida Pinho. (Berlin: Archive Books, forthcoming 2024)
“Ins and Outtakes” (with Peggy Ahwesh) in Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, ed. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023) Winner of the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award.
“Stratman’s Sonic Subscapes” in Geologic Listening, ed. Sukhdev Sandhu and Deborah Stratman. (New York: UnionDocs/Texte und Töne, 2023)
“Ghostly Matter: Filipa César’s Films and Videos” in Reframing Portuguese Cinema in the 21st Century, Volume 1, ed. Daniel Ribas & Paulo Cunha. (Lisbon: agenda, 2020), 197-208.
“The Desertification of Discourse: Punishment Park” (with Rachael Rakes) in Outsider Films on America, ed. Shanay Jhaveri. (Huddinge, Sweden: The Shoestring Publisher, 2019)
“The Body is a Fact” in Valérie Massadian, ed. Maura Edmond and John Edmond. (Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Film Festival, 2019)
Journal Essays
“Sci-Fi-Doc: Intersections and Hybridizations of the Speculative & the Non-fictional,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Spring 2025), In Focus section and introduction co-edited with Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa.
“Theories of the Earth: Surface and Extraction in Landscape Documentary,” World Records (Fall 2018): https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/#/02/05
“Peter Watkins’s Futuresports,” INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media 7-8 (2016-2017). Co- authored with Rachael Rakes.
“Uncertain Spaces (introduction),” fireflies 5: Angela Schanelec (2017), 8-15.
“A MOVIE BY...: Appropriation, Authorship, and the Ecologies of the Moving Image,” First Monday (November 2016).
"Scratch's Third Body: Video Talks Back to Television,” VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture 4.8 (Fall 2015).
Recent Critical Writing
2025
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“Pixel Visions: Dogme 95 and the Emergence of Digital Cinema,” The Criterion Collection (forthcoming)
2024
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“The Ongoing Revolution in Portuguese Cinema,” 4Columns “The Meg: Megalopolis,” Film Comment
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“Harun Farocki: The Inextinguishable Fire,” e-flux
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“Evil Does Not Exist,” 4Columns
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“Conceived in Liberty: Civil War,” Film Comment
2023
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“Ferrari,” 4Columns
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“The Best Short Films of 2023,” Film Comment
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“Prismatic Ground 2023,” e-flux
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“Black Gold: Dry Ground Burning,” Film Comment
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“Beau Is Afraid,” 4Columns
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“Space Ways: 2023 Cosmic Rays Film Festival,” Film Comment
2022
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“Town & Country: Riotsville, USA,” ArtForum
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“Image, Sound, and Silence: Temenos 2022,” Film Comment
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“Ahed’s Knee,” 4Columns
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“Jeppe Hein’s 2-Dimensional Mirror Labyrinth (2006),” at dawn exhibition catalog, Julia Stoschek Collection
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“It Hurts Me Too: Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade,” Film Comment
2021
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“Scenes From a Marriage,” 4Columns
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“All Light, Everywhere,” 4Columns
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“Labyrinth of Passion: Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream,” Reverse Shot
2020
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“Bacurau,” 4Columns
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“Time and Tide: Jon Rubin's Floating Cinema Project,” In Media Res
2019
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Catalog Contributor, Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art “Prison Images,” 4Columns
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“Cici Wu’s ‘Unfinished Return,’” art-agenda
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“Democratic Duty: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park,” Vertical Features
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“Transit,” 4Columns
Performances and Appearances
FILM PRODUCTION
Archival Producer, The Universe in a Grain of Sand, dir. Mark Levinson (2024)
Technical Consultant, Ad Astra, dir. James Gray (2019)
Assistant Producer, The Lord God Bird, dir. George Butler (2008)
Assistant Producer, One Heartbeat: Bobby Bowden and the Florida State Seminoles, dir. George Butler (2008)
Research Interests
Contemporary global cinema, experimental non-fiction cinema, remix/appropriation, film festivals, film criticism, sound theory/practice, ethnography, American cinema, computation and the moving image.