Amalie R Rothschild

Amalie R. Rothschild is an award winning filmmaker and photographer. A co-founder of New Day Films, she has been producing and directing documentaries since 1969 with special emphasis on films about social issues as revealed through the lives of people in the arts. She worked extensively from 1968 to 1974 as a free-lance in the music field, her photos appearing in many publications. From 1969 to 1971 she was part of the Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East Theater in New York producing special effects photography, slides, graphics, films and film loops used during performances and was considered the theater’s unofficial house photographer. She had unlimited access onstage and backstage to all the happenings at the Fillmore East, and was on staff at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. During that period she photographed most of the major rock music events on the East Coast including the 1969 Newport Festival, Tanglewood 1969 & 1970, The Who’s U.S. premiere of their rock opera Tommy and the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, Bob Dylan’s 1974 tour, and in England the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, as well as anti-war/peace demonstrations in the U.S. during the 1960s and the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Her monograph Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir, published in 1999, was reprinted six times. She is co-editor of Amalie Rothschild, a monograph and "portable museum" of the art and legacy of her artist mother and namesake, published in 2012.

Her photographs are seen frequently in CD reissues by Sony Music, Columbia, Rhino and other record labels and in magazines like Mojo and Classic Rock. Her fine art limited edition prints show in many exhibitions internationally. She is represented by several galleries including Morrison Hotel in the U.S. and Snap Galleries in the U.K. She has lived and worked in Italy 7 to 8 months of the year since 1983, and while based in New York City, resides in Florence.

Amalie R. Rothschild has a multi-faceted background in Graphic Design, Photography, Computer Imaging, and Film/Video Production. She has a BFA (1967) in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA (1969) in Film Production from New York University’s Institute of Film and Television. At RISD she spent her senior year on their European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. She studied photography with Harry Callahan and Paul Caponigro. From 1968 to 1974 she worked extensively as a free-lance photographer in the music field, her photographs appearing in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time-Life Books, Life Magazine, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, After Dark and many other publications. From 1969 to 1971 she worked with the Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East Theater in New York producing special effects photography, slides, graphics, films and film loops used during performances and was considered the theater’s unofficial house photographer. She had unlimited access onstage and backstage to all the happenings at the Fillmore East, and was also on staff at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. During that period she photographed most of the major rock music events on the East Coast including the 1969 Newport Festival, Tanglewood 1969 & 1970, The Who’s 1969 U.S. premiere of their rock opera Tommy, the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden in November 1969, Bob Dylan’s 1974 tour and, in England, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival. Rolling Stone featured her photograph of Bob Dylan on the cover of Issue 43. Bobbs Merrill devoted 30 pages to her work in their 1972 book The Photography of Rock. She was one of the two photographers for the 1987 Prentice Hall book The Food Lovers Guide to the Real New York. A selection of her work is in the Abbeville Press book Radical Rags (1990), Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out (Doubleday 1992), Cherokee Mist: The Lost Writings of Jimi Hendrix (HarperCollins 1993), Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (Clarkson Potter 1998), Dylan (Metro Books 1998), Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie that Shook Up the World and Defined a Generation (1999 Michael Wiese Prod), A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Broadway Books/Random House 2002), Jimi Hendrix–Musician (Backbeat Books 2004), Classic Hendrix (Genesis Publications 2004), Grateful Dead Gear (Backbeat Books 2006), Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd (Mind Head Publishing 2007), The Grateful Dead: 365 Days (Abrams 2008), Fire and Rain (Da Capo Press 2011), Eric Clapton Treasures (Carlton Books 2013) and Roger Daltrey (St. Martin's/Macmillan) among many others. In 1999 Acid Test Productions/Thunder’s Mouth Press published a hardcover monograph of her pictures, Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir. In 2000 it came out in a softcover edition and has been reprinted six times.

A skilled and veteran filmmaker, she has been producing and directing documentaries since 1969 with special emphasis on films about social issues as revealed through the lives of people in the arts. Her film Painting The Town: The Illusionistic Murals of Richard Haas (1990) is about the architectural trompe l’oeil mural artist whose witty work is transforming the American urban landscape. It premiered at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and screened in the New Directors/New Films Series co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art. It won a Golden Gate Award at the 1990 San Francisco International Film Festival, a CINE Golden Eagle, a Blue Ribbon and the “Emily” Best of Festival Award at the 1990 American Film and Video Festival, and the 2nd Award at Media Save Art at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1991. Its PBS broadcast was in 1991. In both 1990 and 1992 it was shown for a month on all long-haul flights to Hong Kong by Cathay Pacific Airlines, and in 1993 was licensed by British Airways. In 1998 it was acquired by RAISAT in Italy. Her film Conversations With Willard Van Dyke, about the photographer (co-founder of Group f/64), filmmaker (The City, Valley Town) and first director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, won the BEST in Fine Arts and the BRONZE Award at the 1981 San Francisco International Film Festival and was broadcast by the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corp, TV New Zealand, WNET Channel 13, NDR German TV and RAISAT. It is distributed by The Museum of Modern Art in NY and New Day Films. All of her films, including others like Woo Who? May Wilson (1969), It Happens To Us (1972), and Nana, Mom and Me (1974), have been shown throughout the world in film festivals such as London, Edinburgh, Nyon, Rotterdam, New Delhi, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Tampere, Pesaro and the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy, and have been showcased in Museums across the United States including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chicago Art Institute, St. Louis Museum, Walker Art Center, High Museum Atlanta, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, Pacific Film Archive and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.

One of the 4 original founders in 1971 of New Day Films, the pioneering self-distribution cooperative, she has received many production grants including the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker grant (1973); National Endowment for the Arts 1977, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1987; New York State Council on the Arts 1978, 1987; Ohio Joint Program in the Arts and Humanities 1985; Pinewood Foundation 1978; and John Hay Whitney 1978, 1980. From 1976-78 she taught film production at New York University, and in 1977 was invited by Margaret Mead to lecture and show Nana, Mom and Me at the Kin and Communities Symposium at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2007 it won an award for its pioneering role in autobiographical cinema at the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy, where she also had a retrospective of her films and an exhibition of her music photographs. She has been honored with one-woman exhibitions of her films at the Sheldon Film Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, a “What’s Happening” program at The Museum of Modern Art in NY, and other dedicated shows of her work at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA, the High Museum in Atlanta, Film Forum NYC, among others. In both 2008 and 2018 she had a mini retrospective at the International Festival of Women’s Films in Florence, Italy.

She lectures and shows her films frequently at museums, libraries, schools, colleges and universities. Between 1982 and 1987 she did programs under the auspices of the U.S. Information Service in New Zealand, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. She also does workshops and seminars on photography and digital imaging at the university level. She is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who of American Women, Who’s Who in the World, and Who’s Who in Entertainment. In addition, she speaks Italian fluently and since 1983 divides her time between New York and Italy where she is developing new projects. In 2002, after 19 years in Rome, she moved to Florence. Besides preparing exhibitions and printing her photographs in a traditional wet darkroom, she also spent 10 years in collaboration with Angelo Pontecorboli creating a 512 page full color book, Amalie Rothschild, published in 2012, documenting the artwork and legacy of her artist mother and namesake who died in November 2001. She is continuing research on her mother's catalogue raisonnée which will be published online.

Her first solo exhibition of her rock music pictures was from June to August 1997 at the SoHo Triad Fine Arts Gallery in New York City. Her second show was from April to May 1998 at the Gomez Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, and her third exhibition was from February to May 1999 in the corporate headquarters gallery of the music television cable channel VH1 Music First in the Viacom Building in NYC. A selection of her work hangs in Hard Rock Cafes in NYC, St. Louis and Rome, Italy; in July 2000 her photograph of Tina Turner and Janis Joplin singing together was given as a gift to President Clinton and displayed in the Music Room at the White House. It is also in the private collections of Lenny Kravitz, Tommy Hilfiger, Dr. Jonathan Samet and many others. Eleven of her pictures are featured in the permanent collection of the Pop Music Museum in Seattle, WA. Her work is seen frequently on covers and in the booklets of compact disc reissues by Sony Music, Columbia, Grateful Dead Merchandising, Rhino and other record labels and in magazines like Mojo, Rolling Stone, and Classic Rock. Previously with Soho Triad Fine Arts Gallery in New York, Govinda Gallery, Washington, D.C., Gomez Gallery, Baltimore, MD, David Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Michele Mosko Fine Art in Denver, CO, all now closed, and Staley-Wise Gallery and Bonni Benrubi Gallery, both in NYC, since 2014 she is represented by the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, as well as the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, NM, Heart of Gold in Charleston, SC, Goya in Baltimore, MD and Snap Galleries in the UK.

She has had over 17 solo exhibitions and been included in numerous group shows. Sixteen of her photographs were in the exhibition Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era at the Tate Liverpool, UK May 27–September 25, 2005 which traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, Vienna, Austria in 2006, and the Whitney Museum NYC in 2007. Her photo of Miles Davis was in the exhibition We Want Miles at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, France in 2009, Montreal, Canada in 2010 and Rio De Janeiro & São Paulo, Brazil in 2011. Thirteen photos were featured in Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution which traveled to 7 venues in the US between 2015 and 2021.