From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organised retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Fei Mu, Valerio Zurlini, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, German, Italian and Argentine cinema. In 1995, together with Unifrance, he created “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema”, the leading American showcase for new French cinema. A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton; in 2015-2016, he was a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard; and in 2022 a Visiting Professor at La Sorbonne. He has also taught courses at Beijing University, Gedi Art Institute (Tokyo), la Universidad de Cine (Buenos Aires), the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the Universidad Catolica de Chile, and the University of São Paulo. In May 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” award at the UNAM in Mexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema”. In 2024, he was the Walt Disney Visiting Professor in American Art at Culture at Tsinghua University in Beijing and is currently a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Qatar.