Karen Cooper
Karen Cooper is the director of New York's Film Forum.
Biography
Since 1972 Karen Cooper has been Director of Film Forum, presiding over the growth of this nonprofit New York City cinema from its early years as a 50-seat screening room to its present day operation: a 3-screen cinema, located in lower Manhattan, considered one of America’s leading venues for new American independents and foreign art features, as well as repertory programming (repertory programmed by Bruce Goldstein since 1987).
In addition to supervising the running of the cinema, Cooper, with Mike Maggiore, selects its New York premieres. During the 1970s she introduced the early films of the New German Cinema (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter), during the 1980s, such documentary hits as ATOMIC CAFE and EYES ON THE PRIZE, and during the 1990s feature films by Allison Anders, Carl Franklin and Emir Kusturica, plus Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER series, and documentaries by Chris Marker, Frederick Wiseman, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Other directors whose films she has premiered: Agnès Varda, Terence Davies, Heddy Honigmann, the Quay Brothers, Jan Svankmajer, Kelly Reichardt, Jessica Hausner, Volker Schlondorff, Jonathan Demme, Bruno Dumont, Leos Carax, Patricio Guzman, Bruce Weber, Michael Haneke, Asghar Farhadi, Rithy Panh, Nicolas Philibert, and Margarethe von Trotta.