Hannah Rothfield is a prop historian, archivist, designer, and production researcher whose work interrogates the shifting trajectories of filmic objects—their movement between labor and aesthetics, their entanglement in systems of archiving and obsolescence, their power to inscribe and erase memory.

As a graduate student at Pratt Institute, where she is pursuing dual Master's degrees in Library and Information Science and History of Art and Design, Hannah’s research considers the afterlife of props—how objects, once embedded in cinematic artifice, persist or disappear within institutional archives, private collections, and the informal economies of production waste. The prop, like the photograph, is a paradox: at once an index of a world that never truly existed and an artifact that accrues historical weight. Objects, like texts, have biographies. Their movements reveal tensions—between preservation and disposal, between sanctioned history and the shadow economies of the discarded, between the material and the ephemeral, the study of material histories.

Objects do not simply exist; they accumulate histories, shifting in significance as they pass between contexts—set to storage, artifact to commodity, archive to oblivion. Hannah’s work continues to explore these trajectories of meaning, function, and displacement, bridging cinema, archival theory, and material culture in an effort to rethink the social lives of things—both on-screen and off.