Robert Grosvenor Gardner (November 5, 1925 – June 21, 2014) was an American academic, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker who was director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University from 1956 to 1997. Gardner was known for his work in visual anthropology and films including the National Film Registry inductee Dead Birds and Forest of Bliss. In 2011, a retrospective of his work was held at Film Forum, New York.
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Biography
Gardner was the sixth child and third son, born in the home of his grandmother Isabella Stewart Gardner. He was a cousin of poet Robert Lowell.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1947, Gardner became an assistant to Thomas Whittemore at Harvard's Fogg Museum, traveling to Anatolia, Faiyum, and London to work with Coptic textiles and restore Byzantine art. He briefly taught medieval art and history at the College of Puget Sound in Washington state, where he studied the writings of anthropologist Ruth Benedict. He then earned an MA in anthropology from Harvard. During this period, he joined an expedition among Kalahari Desert Bushmen, photographing, filming, and conducting preliminary fieldwork. In 1957, he founded The Film Study Center, a production and research unit at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, where he made documentary films until he left the center in 1997.