APAG Board of Directors
Mary Engel, Executive Director & Founder
© Janette Beckman
Mary Engel is the founder and president of the American Photography Archives Group, APAG, an award winning filmmaker and the director of the Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive.
Engel has been the director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive since its inception in 1985. She is responsible for all aspects of managing the archive including sales, licensing, marketing, legal issues, preservation and social media. Engel works with photography galleries, museums and auction houses in the United States and abroad. She has published four catalogs of photography.
Engel’s first film “Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996, and went on to screen at many other festivals. The film was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the “Outstanding Documentaries of 1996.” Her film “Morris Engel: The Independent” premiered on Turner Classic Movies, TCM in 2009. Engel is also a contributing producer of “Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York” released in 2011.
She has recently participated on panels at POWarts and Photoville, and has lectured at Harvard University, New York University, Brooklyn Historical Society, St. Louis Art Museum, Central Park Conservancy, and has appeared at the Avon Theater, (Stamford, CT), Loews Jersey (Jersey City, NJ) Film Forum (New York, NY) and the Egyptian Theater (Park City, Utah). She has been published in The New York Times, the American Society of Media Photographers magazine, Photo District News and Film Comment.
Engel is the 2017 recepient of the Griffin Museum of Photography – Focus Spotlight Award. She also completed the 2017 Seminar on Strategy for Artist-Endowed Foundation Leaders presented by the Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative (AEFI),
Grayson Dantzic, Executive Vice President
© Willie Chu
Grayson Dantzic is an archivist, curator, documentary videographer and photographer. He is a graduate of The Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University, with an M.L.S. plus a B.A. from Brandeis University. In 1999, he established the Jerry Dantzic Archives with his mother, Cynthia Dantzic, which is dedicated to the rediscovery and preservation of the photographic legacy of his father, Jerry Dantzic [1925-2006] a two-time Guggenheim Fellow. He is also project archivist for the Paul Seligman Collection/Metropolitan Opera Archives and others.
Dantzic has curated photographic exhibitions and presented at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; The Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Australia; The Shanghai Art Museum, China; The National Arts Club, NY, and the Archive As Project Conference (on behalf of APAG), Warsaw, Poland. He edited and wrote text for Jerry Dantzic’s “New York: The Fifties in Focus” (Edition Stemmle, 2002) and the upcoming “Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill” (Thames & Hudson, 2017). He is a co-founder with Mary Engel of the American Photography Archives Group where he has served as Executive Vice President since its formation in 2000.
Robert Gurbo, Board Member
Long time curator Robert Gurbo was a working photographer when he met Andre Kertész while employed in the Cultural Council Foundation’s CETA Artists Project. He worked with/for Kertész over the last seven years of Kertész’s life, and has spent over fifty years combing through Kertész’s archive. Gurbo is co-author of the catalog that accompanied the 2005 National Gallery exhibit, André Kertész, published by Princeton University Press. He is editor and author of Andre Kertész: The Early Years, and Andre Kertész: The Polaroids. He also organized the reissue of Kertész’s seminal book, On Reading.
Ernest Londa, Attorney
Ernest Londa, Esq. was born in 1956 in Danbury Connecticut. Soon thereafter his family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he grew into a young adult with keen interests in politics, theater, and the arts. After graduation from Duke University with training in Political Science, Psychology, and the Social Sciences he went to work as a paralegal at a well regarded Manhattan law firm. Londa attended an orthodox law school, The Fuchsberg Law Center, and eventually was admitted to the New York State Bar.
He immediately went to work for a local judge who had retired into private practice where he was trained in the conduct of a general civil practice which included real estate, estate work, business law, and arts law. Londa has managed his own general civil practice for the past fifteen years in midtown Manhattan.
Londa has been involved in the creation of, and has advisory roles with, numerous business ventures on behalf of his clientele, several of whom are working artists. He has known Mary Engel since childhood and has served with her on the board of APAG since its formation in 2000.