P. Adams Sitney, emeritus professor of visual arts in Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, was widely regarded as the leading historian of avant-garde cinema within the field of Arts and Culture. Best known for his seminal book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 1974; editions 1979, 2002), he established the canonical account of American avant-garde cinema post-World War II. Sitney earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Yale University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale in 1980. Early in his career, he edited Filmwise as a teenager, championing filmmakers like Willard Maas, Marie Menken, and Maya Deren. In 1970, he cofounded the Anthology Film Archives, serving as coselector of its Essential Cinema series and holding managerial and archival positions. Before joining Princeton in 1980, Sitney taught film at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, New York University, and Cooper Union. At Princeton, he collaborated with colleagues Emmet Gowin and James Seawright, teaching core courses in film history, major filmmakers, the language of cinema, and avant-garde cinema that formed the backbone of the university’s film studies curriculum. He also contributed to the humanities sequence, covering periods from Antiquity to the 20th century, often taking on extra teaching in humanistic studies.

Sitney’s other major publications include Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1990), Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (University of Texas Press, 1995), Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2015). He edited key volumes such as Film Culture Reader (1970), The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives (1975), Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (1978), and others. His honors include Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2010), the Logos-Siegfried Kracauer Award for critical writing (2008), the Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize (2011), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). Sitney retired from Princeton and passed away on June 8, 2025.

Professional Email: padams@princeton.edu