While researching the earliest history of cinema and intellectual property as a Kluge Fellow in 2022, Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp discovered the identity of the first motion picture copyright registration ever made, in 1893 by Thomas Edison’s head photographer William Dickson.

Claudy is Principal Academic in Film, and faculty member at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management. During the 2022 Spring semester, she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She is a 2023 Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.

She holds a PhD (Art & Media) from the University of Plymouth on the relationship between copyright ownership, access to archival film, and film historiography. She is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam (Film & Television Studies) and the University of East Anglia (Film Archiving).