Walter Forsberg works as Curator of Audiovisual Media for Smithsonian Libraries and Archives' pan-institutional Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative. Prior to his curatorial appointment at SLA in 2022, Walter served as the founding Media Archivist for the National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2014-2018 and was a key player in the establishment of its Media Conservation and Digitization department, the Great Migration Home Movie Project, the Robert F. Smith Community Curation program, and construction of the Oprah Winfrey Theater's digital cinema and motion picture film systems. Walter has also served as a contractor and policy consultant on audiovisual accessibility for web content within the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Walter holds a B.A. from McGill University, where his research focused on 19th century cemetery archives, and an M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) from NYU, where he also served as Research Fellow from 2010-2013 and as Adjunct Professor from 2020-2022. Walter was a Fulbright Specialist in Library Science from 2021-2024. His films and videos have screened internationally at the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Toronto film festivals, and at the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Walter has preserved audiovisual collections for the Museo Jumex, the Kramlich Collection/New Art Trust, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (UNAM), NYU, Rutgers University, as well as for a half dozen Smithsonian museums and research centers. He actively works with international artists to preserve their films and digital oeuvres, among them: Madeline Anderson, Cory Arcangel, Jesse Lerner, Elena Pardo, Lillian Schwartz, and Naomi Uman. An advocate for community archiving approaches, two public digitization projects designed and initiated by Walter have been awarded the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s “Innovative Project” award (2014’s XFR STN and 2019’s Great Migration Home Movie Project). He is an active member of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine in Mexico City, and Member-at-Large of XFR Collective.

Walter has worked as an Archival Producer on documentary projects for the National Film Board of Canada, the New York Times, and for the City of Hope: Resurrection City & the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign exhibition, winner of the 2019 Smithsonian Institution Secretary’s Research Prize. His current research and preservation praxis focus on ephemeral and orphan works, African American documentary, and independent Mexican productions of the immediate pre- and post-NAFTA era. 

Walter has co-authored several institutional policy papers, including: the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Technical Committee’s Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software (2011); the NYU Libraries publication, Video At Risk: Strategies for Preserving Commercial Video Collections in Libraries, Section 108 Copyright Guidelines (2013); and the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office’s white paper, Web Content Accessibility for Digital Audiovisual Assets (2020). His recent scholarship on media art conservation appears in BlackFlash magazine, the Duke University Press anthology Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, and the INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, where he is a contributing editor. In 2023 Canyon Cinema published his co-edited anthology about Mexican microcinemas, Cine-Espacios.

Chapter

• Forsberg, Walter. 2019. "Red Star/Black Star: The Early Career of Film Editor Hortense Beveridge, 1948-1968." In Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film. Field, Allyson Nadia and Gordon, Marsha, editors. 112–135. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2019

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