The Festival was started in 2001 by then-Brown juniors David Peck and Justin Slosky in collaboration with students of the other seven Ivy League schools including vice chairman Doug Imbruce from Columbia University.

Past attendees of Ivy Film Festival include well-known film directors, screenwriters, and actors, such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, Lena Dunham, Adrien Brody, Aaron Sorkin, James Franco, Wes Craven,[6] Philip Glass, Mira Nair, Chan-wook Park, Doug Liman, John Cho, Kal Penn, Davis Guggenheim, Dylan Kidd, James Toback, John Hamburg, Julia Stiles, Laura Linney, and Michael Showalter.

Preview screenings hosted by the Festival have included Neighbors, Locke, The Way, Way Back, The East, (500) Days of Summer, Star Trek (2009), Mean Girls, The Believer, Brick, Shine a Light, The Aristocrats, and the Academy Award-winning and -nominated No Country for Old Men, Super Size Me, Half Nelson, Murderball, Water, and Iraq in Fragments.

[2] Events hosted by the Festival included talks from Oliver Stone and Henry Bean as well as the U.S. premiere of James Toback's Harvard Man, starring Adrien Grenier.

The Festival hosted and presented awards to director Wes Craven and Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody, as well as holding a business panel featuring Paramount Studio Vice Chairman Rob Friedman.

In 2005, the Ivy Film Festival screened the movies The Aristocrats and Murderball and featured John Hamburg, writer of the screenplays of Zoolander and Meet the Parents, as a keynote speaker.

The 5th annual Ivy Film Festival, held in 2006, featured screenings of Black Gold, Occupation: Dreamland, Kinky Boots, Take the Lead, and The Children of Chabannes, as well as Sundance favorites Iraq in Fragments, Half Nelson, and Brick.

The 2008 festival featured a keynote address by Fox Filmed Entertainment Co-chairman and CEO, Tom Rothman, and a master class led by Martin Scorsese.

[12] The 2009 Film Festival occurred on April 21–26 and featured a keynote panel with actor Jack Nicholson, Chinatown producer Robert Evans, and Paramount Chairman and CEO Brad Grey, moderated by former Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart.

Keynote speaker Wes Anderson addressed audiences in two sold-out theatre rooms via Skype following a screening of his critically acclaimed film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The 2014 Festival had a number of individual speakers including Casey Neistat and David Frankel as well as a “Women in Entertainment” panel Nancy Josephson, Karen O’Hara, Samantha Stiglitz, and Lauren Zalaznick.

Attendees were invited to participate in workshops with Matthew Frost and Michael Schultz, and to see a panel focusing on animation in film with Brenda Chapman, Ron Ryder, and Barbara Meier.