Joan Koch, executive director of the influential Film Society of Lincoln Center, has died at age 92.

Joan Koch, longtime executive director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center who helped shape film culture in New York and around the world, has died. He was 92 years old.

Koch died Tuesday in New York, said a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center Film, as the organization is now known. the hollywood reporter.

Koch, who worked at the prestigious New York Film Festival from 1971 to 2003, was also a publicist. movie review The magazine co-produces 19 Chaplin Awards galas, which each spring honor the top film artist as a major fundraising event. His streak began with Fred Astaire in 1973 and ended with Audrey Hepburn in 1991.

An insatiable movie lover, Koch was born in Brooklyn on October 19, 1929. In 1950, he graduated from Goddard University in Vermont with a BA in political science, and that same year worked as a researcher in the museum’s film department. Modern art.

He left MoMA in 1954 to raise his family, but returned in 1965 when he became technical director in charge of the film preservation program. However, she left again in 1967 due to the nepotism rule that went into effect when she married Richard Koch, MoMA’s acting advisor and managing director.

After three years at Grove Press, he oversaw the subtitling and dubbing of films in its collection and was part of the legal team involved in the 1967 Swedish erotic film censorship trial. I’m curious (yellow) – Koch joined the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1971 as a freelancer to program his films in the park.

“I clearly remember that we had programmed a short Carol Ballard song in a park in the Bronx called pigs, which was a fascinating film about these animals”, he recalls. “However, many young viewers were expecting a detective movie and started throwing drink cans at the screen when they got frustrated.

He soon took over the management of the New York Film Festival.

In 1972, he helped launch the annual New Directors/New Films spring event and helped bring Charlie Chaplin back to the US after years in exile.

Chaplin was honored [weeks later] by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and most coverage of his return suggests he came to accept the Oscar, but in fact he came to us first and at our invitation,” Koch said.

The event was so successful that the Film Society decided to establish an annual program to honor outstanding cinematography. Other honorees under his supervision included Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Newman and Joan Woodward, George Cukor, Barbara Stanwyck, Billy Wilder, Laurence Olivier, Claudette Colbert, Federico Fellini and Bette Davis.

Koch initiated the purchase movie review in 1974, then promoted to Executive Director of the Film Society in 1977. He also served as the organization’s chief financial officer for many years and was appointed to the board of directors in 1999.

His “passion and drive led the organization from the first day of the annual New York Film Festival to the opening of the Walter Reed Theater in 1991 and the development of the Eleanor Bunin Munro Film Center, which opened in 2011,” Film at Lincoln Center. indicated.

Koch received the title of Officer of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture in 1984 and was appointed Officer of Arts and Letters by the French National Center for Cinematography in 2000.

In 2012, he co-edited the New York Film Festival Gold with Laura Kemm and Richard Peña, an edition that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the New York Film Festival. The longtime resident of Greenwich was executive director emeritus of Lincoln Center at the time of his death.

Her first husband was Oscar Godbout, who became a columnist for Wood, Field and Stream. The New York Times newspaper.

The survivors are his daughter, Andrea; Chapin’s stepsons Jeremy and Steven; and two grandchildren.