<p>John Bennett Kuiper was born on June 22, 1928 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was a professor. He attended schools in Lexington, Kentucky and completed his B.A. in Art at the University of Kentucky. As a 20 year old, Kuiper started a career in photography, and indeed one of his photos is housed in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art. With his interest in art and photography, John spent a year at László Moholy-Nagy’s <i>New Bauhaus</i> school at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1952-53, where he was also a cameraman for NBC-TV and a Chicago-based show, <i>Zoo Parade</i>. He then joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps for two years, before going to Iowa for graduate work.<p/>

<p>He was hired in summer 1965 to run the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress (LoC), which had recently been added to the brief of Prints and Photographs Division.  John had been recommended to the post by Eileen Bowser, who he met while conducting his Eisenstein research. In 1967, the American Film Institute was founded by an act of Congress, and through John’s efforts began funding preservation at the LoC, the first such work actively conducted by the institution.  According to his colleague, Paul Spehr, John was also responsible – with NEA Administrator Chloe Aaron – for convincing the <i>National Endowment of the Arts</i> to set up a funding committee, which became the AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists.  As Spehr recently recalled, John also <i>“reversed the Library's policy of copying and then destroying nitrate film.  Finally, he initiated a program to establish and apply quality standards for films deposited in the Library for Copyright registration, and worked to establish a film preservation laboratory at the Library in the 1970s.”i> While at the LoC, Kuiper was also instrumental in its membership of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives), was elected to the Executive Committee after 1970, and was Vice-President of the Federation from 1971-1977. Along with Eileen Bowser, he edited FIAF's A Handbook for Film Archives (1980).<p/>

<p>In 1977, John Kuiper was named Director of the Film Department at Eastman Museum, after the sudden retirement of founder James Card.<p/>

<p>In May 1987, John accepted a position as Chair of the Department of Radio/Television/Film at North Texas State University, where he spent 12 years, including serving nine years as the Chair. There, he taught film history, criticism and theory, media copyright and legislation, film and television archives, and film production. He also became more heavily involved in the <i>University Film and Video Association,</i> an organization he had been President in the 1960s, which presented him with a Life Achievement Award in 1998.<p/>

<p>John B. Kuiper died on May 11, 2017 in Washington, D.C.<p/>

Bio drawn in part from the UCLA archive's obit by Jan-Christopher Horak, 06/09/2017.