Bill Pence, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, died Dec. 6 when a longtime illness, the Telluride Daily Planet reported on Wednesday. He was 82.

Pence co-founded the festival in 1974 with his wife Stella, film preservationist James Card, producer Tom Luddy and the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities. He also served as co-director and president of the National Film Preserve, which continues to operate the Telluride Film Festival annually.

“Bill Pence is an almost mythical figure in the landscape of the Telluride Film Festival. An incredibly generous founder but any single description isn’t enough,” Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, said in a statement public with Variety. “A showman, a visionary, a great leaders, a film buff — all of these things and more. But most importantly of all, Bill was a enormous person. Kind and smart and a wonderful father and husband. We continue to be inspired by his example and vow to stop the important work of film appreciation.”

A boring of Minneapolis, Pence worked as an usher in the city’s movie palaces growing up. He united and ran the student film society at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) in the ’50s, where he presented a strange film program to students. After college, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and seen for several years.

From 1965 to 1978, Pence worked as the vice presidential of Janus Films in New York. He was instrumental in growing its collection that later seen as the basis for the Criterion Collection.

For 33 ages, the Pences helped program and expand the Telluride Film Festival pending their retirement in 2006. They also created the Santa Fe Film Festival in 1980, which ran for three years.

After their Telluride exit, Pence and his wife were recruited by Turner Classic Movies to help clean and run the TCM Classic Film Festival. For over 50 ages, Pence assembled a collection of film prints that now resides at the Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard Film Archive.

In second to his wife, Pence is survived by his daughters Zazie and Lara and four grandchildren.