The American Museum of the Moving Image is dedicated to educating the public about the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media, and to examining their impact on culture and society. It achieves these goals by maintaining the nation's largest permanent collection of moving image artifacts, and by offering the public exhibitions, film screenings, lectures, seminars, and other education programs.

The Museum is located on the site of what was once the largest, busiest, and most significant motion picture and television production facility between London and Hollywood, the famous Astoria Studio. Built in 1920 across the East River from midtown Manhattan, the studio was Paramount's East Coast production facility, and, in the 1930s, a site for independent film production. In 1942 the U.S. Army bought the Astoria Studio and renamed it the Signal Corps Photographic Center. The studio filled a major need for expanded productionapability to speed the training of millions of wartime inductees. After the Army left in 1971, the site fell into disrepair until the Museum took shape in the eighties.

The museum has assembled the nation's largest and most comprehensive holdings of moving image artifacts, which is one of the most important collections of its kind in the world, numbering more than 83,000 items. For example, the collection includes: photographed studies of locomotion made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887; an early mechanical television created in 1931 by C. Francis Jenkins; the chariot driven by Charlton Heston in the epic film BEN HUR (1959); Computer Space, the first coin-operated video arcade game released by Nolan Bushnell in 1971; a character puppet of Yoda, created by Stuart Freeborn for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980); and TUT'S FEVER (1986-88), an installation artwork by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong.