at film festivals such as Sundance and TIFF. Rich asserted that these independent films, made by and for queer-identified people, used radical aesthetics to combat homophobia, grapple with the trauma of the AIDS epidemic, and address complicated queer subjectivities while importing much needed discussions of race. Rich argued that, although films dealing with these issues can be found in the previous decade, New Queer Cinema broke with the gay liberation ethos that self-representation should remain positive and desirable. Rich's presence at film festivals (such as Sundance, where she was an early member of the selection committee; TIFF, where she served as an international programmer in 2002; Telluride, where she was Guest Director in 1996; and Provincetown, where she appears every spring) has been significant. Her film reviews in major national publications, and her commentary on public broadcasting programs such as The World, Independent View, and All Things Considered, have led to her being characterized as a "central figure" in cinema studies and culture. Publications Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement The back cover of her 1998 book, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, reads: "If there was a moment during the sixties, seventies, or eighties that changed the history of the women's film movement, B. Ruby Rich was there. Part journalistic chronicle, part memoir, and 100 percent pure cultural historical odyssey, Chick Flicks – with its definitive, the way-it-was collective essays – captures the birth and growth of feminist film as no other book has done." Her book includes critical analyses of Sally Potter's Thriller, the films of Yvonne Rainer, and Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform. New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut Mostly an assemblage of Rich's published writing on queer films of the preceding decades, New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut moves from the moment of New Queer Cinema's inception in the early 1990s festival circuit to its Hollywood co-option in the late 1990s to its more recent international impact and European and U.S. mainstreaming. The book includes studies of the films The Watermelon Woman, Go Fish, Milk, as well as the films of Lucrecia Martel and Gregg Araki. Contributions Rich was a regular contributor to The Village Voice , the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound. She has also contributed to The Guardian, The Nation, Elle, Mirabella, The Advocate and Out. She was the