São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound

The São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound, the Museu da Imagem e do Som or MIS, grew out of a 1960s project by Brazilian intellectuals including Ricardo Cravo Albin, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes and Rudá de Andrade. They wanted Brazil to have institutions that studied and documented the new media traditional museums had ignored, and this public museum opened in 1970.

Its collection holds more than 350,000 entries: short films, features and documentaries, videos, records, photographs and works of graphic design. The museum also transcribes and documents oral tradition. It runs LabMIS, a research and production center for new media with an artist-in-residence program.

Since 1975 the museum has occupied a 5,000-square-metre building in the Pinheiros district. In the 1970s and 1980s it was an active center for artistic diffusion and education. It became an important reference for studying Brazilian audio-visual production, which makes it especially suited to visitors interested in the country's film, photography and recorded sound.