[7] In 2024, the Flaherty Seminar and Visible Evidence partnered to co-create the Patricia Zimmermann Fellowship Fund to help emerging curators, scholars, artists, and historians of alternative and new media to attend either event: "As a connector and builder, Patty was an indomitable force in both our communities.
With Thomas Shevory, she transformed FLEFF to include new media, installations, live performances, panels, and workshops on a redefined and expanded definition of environmental issues to focus on interconnections between war, air, disease, the land, health, water, genocide, food, education, technology, cultural heritage, and diversity.
The exhibition focused attention on "the hidden histories of place-based documentaries that situate their collaborative practices in specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change.
Zimmermann authored and co-authored numerous scholarly books and articles that address urgent issues, including women's rights, war, environmentalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, that were not always covered in news media or film studies scholarship.
[13] By studying uses of consumer technologies like 8mm, Super-8, and 16mm cameras, as well as amateur film journals on how to use them, Zimmermann was able to trace a social history of the United States through media made by non-professionals.
She argues that home movies are "not simply an inert designation of inferior film practice and ideology but rather a historical process of social control over representation.
She proffered a more artisanal, humanist, mystical, and poetic view of documentary and cinema in general"[17] The seminar hosts 200 participants each year and keeps audio recordings of discussions, some of which Zimmermann and Erik Barnouw published in a special quadruple issue of Wide Angle in 1996.
"[19] Zimmermann had included these new documentary forms as a part of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival since 2007 and had written about them in Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015) with Dale Hudson.
With filmmaker Helen De Michiel, Zimmermann published Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (2018) as a means of bridging the theory/practice divide within film education.
More recently, she published a series of articles in Afterimage on polyphony and co-creation, two ways of moving away from she considered a Hollywood model of film auteurs that had taken root in documentary studies, particularly after the explosion of documentary in theatrical release after films like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002) on the mass shooting epidemic in the United States and Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), starring former US vice president Al Gore.
Our creative collaborative was a combination of academics and community-based musicians, artists and scholars who sought to use musical improvisation and spoken word performance to rethink the exhibition of silent film.
"[23] Live performances with archival film in collaboration with the Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution include: "Dismantling Empire" (2004) and "Dismantling War" (2005) with Simon Tarr and Art Jones; "The Four Seasons of Astor Piazzolla" (2006) with pianists Jairo Geronymo and Diane Birr, and tango dancers, multimedia remix by Tom Nicholson; "Memescapes" (2007), produced by Anne Michel and Phil Wilde and live music with Judy Hyman, Jeff Claus, Robbie Aceto; and "West Side Story Counterpoint" (2008) with pianists Jairo Geronymo and Deborah Martin, soprano Deborah Lifton and bass baritone Brad Hougham, multimedia design by Phil Wilde and Anne Michel.