The Known Universe

This 6-minute film, which I curated in 2009 with our great team at AMNH in a co-production with the Rubin Museum, is arguably the first viral science video on the web. Within weeks it had millions of views. Despite being banned in China, because of a reference to Tibet, it remains one of the most revisited science videos on YouTube. The version below has no ads or pop-ups. The link above is the original YouTube version with some 17 million views. A few more films are linked below this one.

Missing Memories of the Universe

This 6-minute film that my dear friend and collaborator, Ali Alvarez, and I put together won a few awards. We made it during the pandemic. It is based on my essay of a similar name and used footage Ali and her team had filmed years before.

Film festival and science film awards for Rebecca Oppenheimer and Ali Alvarez's Missing Memories of the Universe movie.

Journey to the Stars

Planetarium Show

Curated by me and my colleague Mordecai MacLow, and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, below is a trailer with Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaking. The full 25-minute show is not available online. Apologies for the ads.

Profile

This is an add-on to a profile in the magazine, Columbia College Today, Winter 2020-2021, which describes my work from when I was an undergraduate student at Columbia through the next three decades. The article opens with the following sentences:

Rebecca Oppenheimer (class of ’94) is a degenerate. She will happily tell you this. Despite her position as an astrophysics curator at the American Museum of Natural History, a staid institution inhabiting New York City for a century and a half, she peppers her speech with profanity, plays pranks on research collaborators, resists the call of “big science” in order to work on more intimate projects that often involve hand-building new instruments, and has gilded at least one astronomy lecture with slides of kindred spirits Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson.

More to come.