Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, archivist, and essayist. His films have screened throughout the world and been collected by museums and institutions including the Academy Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Northeast Historic Film, the Oberhausen Kurzfilm Archive, Budapest's Balazs Bela Studios, and Munich's Sammlung Goetz. His feature documentary Notfilm was named one of the 10 best films of the year by ARTFORUM, SLATE, and many others.

Formerly Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, his many restorations include Barbara Loden's Wanda, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and works by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Shirley Clarke, Charles Burnett, Kenneth Anger, Lourdes Portillo, Robert Altman, and John Cassavetes. He was a 2008 recipient of Anthology Film Archives' Preservation Honors, and is a three-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics' Heritage Award. His writings on film history, technology, and aesthetics have been published in Artforum, Sight and Sound, and numerous academic books and journals.

His most recent restorations (in partnership with organizations including UCLA Film & Television Archive, Pacific Film Archive, Lightbox Film Center, Milestone Films, Arbelos, and Criterion) include: David Schickele's Bushman, Nancy Savoca's Household Saints, Peter Kass and Ed Emshwiller's Time of the Heathen, Richard Beymer's The Innerview, Eleanor Antin's The Man Without a World and a new 4K digital revisitation of his landmark 35mm work on Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, originally released in 2007. His recent film The Case of the Vanishing Gods premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in fall 2021 and was named to Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of ten best films of 2022.