Joanne Koch

Joanne Koch, the longtime head of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who stared down picketers and, at times, government and church authorities to present controversial works by the likes of Godard and Oshima while presiding over the New York Film Festival, and who oversaw the creation of the center’s own temple for cineastes, the Walter Reade Theater, died on Aug. 16 2022 at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 92. Her most visible role was managing the prestigious New York Film Festival. She graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., with a degree in political science, and in 1950 she took a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1949 she married Oscar A. Godbout, a journalist who covered Hollywood for The New York Times in the 1950s. The couple divorced in 1967, and later that year she married Richard A. Koch, the director of administration for MoMA. Mr. Koch died in 2009. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three stepsons, Stephen Jeremy and Chapin Koch, and two grandsons.