David Francis
Family name: Francis
Awards/Honours: OBE (1986)
Work area/Craft/Role: Archivist
Industry: TV, Film
Company: BFI/NFTVA
Interview date(s): 21 August 2015
Interviewer(s): Murray Weston, Dan Thurley
Production Media: video
Duration (mins): 147
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David Francis was for 15 years Curator of the British National Film Archive, where he was one of the two co-founders and builders of the innovative and award-winning Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI), on London’s South Bank, and where he received the O.B.E. for services to film preservation, having dramatically expanded the holdings of the archive, and built the state-of-the-art J. Paul Getty, Jnr., Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted. Subsequently, 1991 to 2001, he was Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., where he implemented the National Film Registry legislation and built the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (now known as the Packard Campus), in Culpeper, Virginia.
He is a founder-member and was briefly the first President of the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.
He is the Director of the Kent Museum of the Moving Image, founded 2012.
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