First held on 30 August 1974, the festival, hosted at the Sheridan Opera House, was founded [1] by Bill and Stella Pence,[2] Tom Luddy,[3] and James Card[4] of Eastman-Kodak Film Preserve .

The festival has also hosted the American premiere of films such as My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981),[11] Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990), The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014), Sully (Clint Eastwood, 2016), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017), and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023).

Those who have accepted the commission include Chuck Jones, David Salle, Doug and Mike Starn, Dottie Attie, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Francesco Clemente, Dave McKean, Gary Larson[citation needed] and Luke Dorman of Meow Wolf.

Susan Sontag, in her 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism", lamented that, "The purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time, but it has reached some kind of climax this year, with Riefenstahl the guest of honor at a new cinéphile-controlled film festival held in the summer in Colorado...."[15] After serving as guest director in 2001, Salman Rushdie wrote that, "It is extraordinarily exciting, in this age of the triumph of capitalism, to discover an event dedicated not to commerce but to love".

[16] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2002 that "the hothouse filmocentric universe Telluride creates over a Labor Day weekend has always been more a religion than anything as ordinary as a festival, complete with messianic believers and agnostic scoffers.

"[17] Jeffrey Ruoff, a film historian at Dartmouth College, noted in 2015 that "Early buzz at Telluride opens the fall season of North American award speculation that climaxes with the Oscars.