Founded in community
The Cinema Arts Centre was founded by Vic Skolnick and Charlotte Sky in 1973 as a grassroots effort to bring independent, international, classic, and challenging films to Long Island. Over more than fifty years, it grew into one of the region’s most important cultural institutions—a place defined not just by what appeared on its screens, but by the community, conversations, relationships, and ideas that surrounded them.
Stewarded with Integrity
Dylan Skolnick has been central to building and sustaining that identity. Over decades at the Cinema, he developed an extraordinary network of relationships across the film industry and the wider cultural community—with filmmakers, distributors, programmers, artists, critics, educators, advocates, and community leaders. Those relationships brought remarkable films, guests, conversations, collaborations, and opportunities to Huntington, while establishing the Cinema Arts Centre as a respected and deeply connected institution far beyond Long Island.
evolved with purpose
Just as importantly, Dylan has been a steward of the Cinema’s mission: championing independent voices, taking chances on films and filmmakers, creating space for discussion and discovery, and understanding that the Cinema is not simply a venue—it is a cultural community.
Removing Dylan means losing more than a longtime director. It breaks a direct line of leadership, relationships, institutional knowledge, and purpose that stretches back to the Cinema’s founding. For many of us, his dismissal feels like the end of an extraordinary era—and raises profound concerns about whether the mission and community that made the Cinema Arts Centre what it is will continue without him.
