Museum of the Moving Image (New York, USA)

Museum of the Moving Image is a museum in Astoria, Queens, devoted to how moving images are created, circulated, exhibited, and experienced. Film and television form a large part of its subject, but the museum also deals with video games, digital media, sound, special effects, animation, screen performance, production design, and emerging technologies. Its combination of artifacts, interactive installations, working theaters, education facilities, and media laboratories makes it different from a museum concerned only with finished films or film memorabilia.^[Ref-1]

From the Astoria Studio Complex to a Museum of Screen Culture

The museum’s location is part of its institutional story. Its building stands within the former Astoria studio complex, established in 1920 by Famous Players-Lasky as an East Coast production facility. After the company became associated with the Paramount name, the complex remained connected to New York film production before entering a very different phase during World War II.

The U.S. Army took over the studio in 1942 for military film production, and the property became the Signal Corps Photographic Center. After the Army left in 1970, efforts began to restore the complex to production use. Those efforts eventually produced both a revived working studio and a museum devoted to the history and practice of moving images.

1. 1920: Famous Players-Lasky established its East Coast production facility at the Astoria studio complex.
2. 1942: The U.S. Army took over the studios for military film production and operated the Signal Corps Photographic Center there.
3. 1977: The Astoria Motion Picture and Television Center Foundation was established as part of the effort to restore the studio complex.
4. 1978: Film production returned to the studios, and the complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
5. 1982: New York City set aside one of the original studio buildings for the planned museum.
6. 1985: The foundation was reincorporated as the American Museum of the Moving Image.
7. 1988: The museum opened to the public in a building renovated by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects.
8. 2008: Construction began on a major museum renovation and expansion.
9. 2011: The transformed museum opened to the public with new galleries, theaters, education facilities, and spaces for moving-image art.

This sequence explains why the museum and the neighboring production studios should not be treated as unrelated attractions. The museum emerged from the broader effort to preserve Astoria’s role in film and television production, while the adjoining Kaufman Astoria Studios continued as an active production facility.^[Ref-2]

A Collection Built Around How Moving Images Are Made and Used

The permanent collection began in 1981 and now contains approximately 130,000 artifacts. Its scope follows the working life of moving images rather than treating cinema only as a catalogue of completed films. Objects can document how an image was produced, how a performer or fictional character was designed, how a film or television program was marketed, how audiences encountered it, or how technologies changed the act of viewing and playing.

The holdings also include more specialized groups. The museum identifies more than 1,500 glass slides connected with early cinema exhibition and more than 5,000 artifacts dating from the silent-film era, for example. Thousands of collection records can be explored through the museum’s online collection resources, while only a portion of the physical holdings can be displayed in the galleries at any one time.^[Ref-3]

Behind the Screen Turns Production Into the Main Subject

The museum’s long-running Behind the Screen exhibition occupies approximately 15,000 square feet across the second and third floors. About 1,400 artifacts from the permanent collection are incorporated into the exhibition, giving visitors a material record of screen production from nineteenth-century optical devices through contemporary digital practices.

Rather than arranging everything as a chronology of famous movies, the exhibition follows the work needed to make and present moving images. Cameras, projectors, television sets, sound equipment, costumes, production models, posters, fan material, merchandise, and games appear alongside audiovisual examples that explain what these objects did and where they belonged within production or exhibition.

• Animation: An interactive station allows visitors to assemble a stop-motion sequence and see how individual images become movement.
• Sound: Dubbing and sound-effects activities demonstrate how recorded dialogue and effects are fitted to existing images during post-production.
• Music: Visitors can change music accompanying a scene and observe how a different soundtrack alters its emotional reading.
• Broadcast production: A simulated television control-room experience introduces the coordination involved in directing a live broadcast.
• Playable media: Selected arcade and console games from the collection are presented as functioning media rather than only as objects behind glass.

The exhibition also contains commissioned works. Tut’s Fever, created by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong, functions as both an artwork and a small movie theater, while Gregory Barsamian’s Feral Fount uses rotating sculpture and stroboscopic light to produce the perception of animation. These installations allow mechanisms of moving-image perception to become part of the gallery itself.^[Ref-4]

Puppets, Drawings, Scripts, and the Working Methods of Jim Henson

The Jim Henson Exhibition is an ongoing part of the museum rather than a short-term visiting display. It examines Henson’s work through the production process behind The Muppet Show, the Muppet films, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, experimental projects, and work from earlier stages of his career.

Nearly 300 objects are presented in the exhibition. They include 47 puppets as well as character drawings, storyboards, scripts, photographs, costumes, production material, screen footage, and behind-the-scenes recordings. Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Rowlf, Big Bird, Elmo, Cantus Fraggle, and a Skeksis are among the puppets identified by the museum as being represented in the display.

The exhibition grew in part from a major gift by the Henson family. The museum describes that donation as nearly 500 artifacts, including puppets, costumes, production-design material, and licensed merchandise. This gives the Henson material a role beyond character recognition: drawings, scripts, fabricated objects, performance footage, and interactive stations can be studied together as evidence of collaborative screen production.^[Ref-5]

Theaters Keep Exhibition and Film Presentation Connected

Film exhibition is part of the museum’s operation rather than an occasional addition to its galleries. The Sumner M. Redstone Theater and the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room support repertory cinema, new films, restored prints, special presentations, talks, and education programs. The museum states that it presents more than 500 film screenings in a typical year.

This matters to the museum’s subject because projection and theatrical presentation are themselves parts of moving-image history. A camera, film print, projector, theater, and audience represent different stages in one system. MoMI can therefore place an object in a gallery while also presenting films through dedicated screening spaces in the same institution.

A 2011 Expansion Built for Galleries, Education, and Projection

The present visitor experience was shaped by a major renovation and expansion designed by architect Thomas Leeser. Construction began in 2008, and the transformed museum opened in January 2011. New and rebuilt spaces included the main theater, a smaller screening room, a changing-exhibition gallery, areas for video art, the Ann and Andrew Tisch Education Center, and the George S. Kaufman Courtyard.

New York City described the project as a $67 million expansion that nearly doubled the museum to 97,700 square feet. The city was the principal public funder, working through agencies including the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Economic Development Corporation. The project later received a 2011 New York City award for excellence in design.^[Ref-6]

MoMI LAB Extends the Museum Into Emerging Technology

MoMI LAB opened in June 2026 as a free public space within the museum for examining newer forms of technology and their relationship to creativity and everyday media. The lab adds a contemporary working environment to an institution whose collection already traces earlier changes in cameras, projection, television, games, and digital production.

• Public Programs: Talks, performances, screenings, workshops, and other events address emerging technologies through creative practice.
• Artist Residencies: Artists and technologists can work with developing tools through research projects and residencies that lead to public presentations.
• Digital Literacy: Drop-in experiences and workshops give visitors opportunities to investigate technologies through direct use rather than encountering them only through finished products.

The lab is open without charge during its stated public hours and operates through artist-led research, education, and participation. Its presence broadens the museum’s chronological range: historical cameras and optical toys can be studied upstairs while newer spatial, digital, and interactive tools are investigated as active technologies elsewhere in the building.^[Ref-7]

Education Uses the Collection as a Media-Making Resource

The Ann and Andrew Tisch Education Center provides space for tours, screenings, and hands-on production work. Museum programs serve school groups as well as children, teenagers, families, educators, college students, and adult learners. The institution reports serving approximately 70,000 students each year through its education activities.

That teaching model fits the collection particularly well. A historic camera can be examined as an artifact, but animation, sound editing, puppetry, game design, and digital production can also be approached through making. The museum therefore links historical evidence with the practical choices involved in producing screen media.^[Ref-8]

Current Gallery Access, Tickets, and Transportation

The museum currently opens Thursday through Sunday. Thursday hours are 2:00–6:00 p.m., Friday hours are 2:00–8:00 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday hours are 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. Holiday schedules can differ from the regular week.

Standard gallery admission is $20 for adults, $12 for seniors age 65 and older, $12 for students age 18 and older, and $10 for youth ages 3–17. Children under three and museum members receive free gallery admission. General museum admission is also free on Thursdays from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. Advance admission can be purchased online, but the museum states that advance booking is not required and walk-up admission is available.

Screenings and special events can have separate ticket requirements, so a visitor planning around a particular film should consult that program’s current listing rather than assuming gallery admission covers every event. The museum entrance is at 36-01 35 Avenue, near 37 Street in Astoria. The closest subway stations identified by the museum are Steinway Street on the R/M lines and 36 Avenue on the N/W lines; current transit service should be checked before travel.^[Ref-9]

Wheelchair, Sensory, Visual, and Theater Access

The museum states that its building is fully accessible by wheelchair and keeps a wheelchair available for borrowing on a first-come, first-served basis. Sensory kits can be requested at the front desk, and the museum provides a visual-story resource for autistic and neurodivergent visitors.

• Low-vision resources: Lighted eyeglasses can be borrowed at the front desk, and selected objects have visual descriptions and large-print guides.
• Touch access: Scheduled Touch Object Experiences allow visitors to handle selected interpretive objects under staff supervision.
• Theater access: Assistive devices are available for screenings that provide audio description or captioning, with applicable services identified in program listings.
• Care partners: The museum currently offers free admission for one care partner accompanying a visitor with a disability.

Because accessibility features can vary by program, particularly for individual screenings, visitors who need a specific service should use the accessibility information attached to the relevant event as well as the museum’s general access page.^[Ref-10]

Why the Astoria Location Matters to the Collection

Museum of the Moving Image documents screen culture from optical toys and silent-era equipment to television, video games, digital production, puppetry, and emerging media. Yet its Astoria location gives those subjects a physical context that many object collections do not have: the museum developed inside a studio complex where moving images were actually produced.

That relationship also explains the breadth of the institution. The galleries preserve production artifacts, the theaters continue the practice of film exhibition, education spaces allow visitors to make media, and MoMI LAB addresses technologies still developing. Within the landscape of New York museums, MoMI’s defining subject is therefore not one film period or one entertainment industry, but the changing tools and practices through which moving images are made and encountered.