James Layton, 1984–

Biography

James Layton is a film historian and archivist specializing in the history of motion picture technology. He is Manager of The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, and is co-author of two books with David Pierce: The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935 (2015) and King of Jazz: Paul Whiteman’s Technicolor Revue (2016). Prior to working at MoMA, Layton was an archivist at George Eastman Museum, where he curated two gallery exhibitions celebrating CinemaScope and Technicolor, and the informational website Technicolor 100. He was project manager of the East Anglian Film Archive’s digital film archive and website relaunch in 2011, and also contributed to the Image Permanence Institute’s Knowing and Protecting Motion Picture Film informational poster (2010). More recently, he contributed a significant chapter on Eastman Kodak to FIAF’s expanded edition of Harold Brown’s Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification (2020).