Elizabeth Weatherford is the founding director of the Film and Video Center of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and of NMAI’s International Native American Film + Video Festival.  Presented biennially in New York City since 1979, the festival showcases outstanding recent indigenous productions from throughout the Americas and brings the producers together for discussion and interchange in a two-day Native Networks workshop.  The Festival also organizes a New Generations section of workshops and public screenings for Native youth in media. The recent 2006 Festival presented 130 works discussed by their producers, from 10 countries in the Americas.

In addition the Center presents daily and speakers programs in NMAI’s two locations, in New York and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It organizes occasional national and international traveling Native film festivals, and produces with partners the annual ‚Native Cinema Showcase‚  in Santa Fe.  In 2005 in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art and New York University’s Center for Media, Culture and History, and in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Art, Freer/Sackler Museum, and National Museum of Natural History, the Center produced ‚ First Nations\First Features: A Showcase of International Indigenous Cinema‚ in New York and Washington.

Ms. Weatherford is executive editor of the bilingual Native Networks/Redes Indigenas Website, the unique site on the Internet dedicated to Native film, video, radio, television, and new media from throughout the hemisphere, produced by the Film and Video Center since 2001, with feature articles on Native media, profiles of media makers, a filmography of 100′s of works screened at NMAI, Native media organizations, and news of the Native media field.  She is on the advisory boards of numerous film festivals and has been profiled in the New York Times column ‚”Public Lives.” Other articles about her work have appeared in the New York Sun and newspapers in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Tampa, and Rio de Janeiro, and national publications such as Indian Country Today and The Independent.  She has served on the faculty of New York University’s Program in Media and Culture and the School of Visual Arts.