Tony Gittens is the founder and director of Filmfest DC, the Washington, DC International Film Festival. He previously served as executive director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for 11 years, from 1997-2008.
Gittens has been a fixture on the Washington cultural scene since the 1960s, when he was a campus leader and student newspaper editor at Howard University. In the 1970s, Gittens was the first manager of the then-influential Drum and Spear bookstore in Columbia Heights. Later, he founded the Black Film Institute at the University of the District of Columbia, which brought foreign and U.S. films by black talent to public attention.
