The American Dance Festival has recorded its performances on film from the start, catching faculty, staff, and performers on camera at Bennington College in 1934. ADF directors early on saw the value of documenting the modern dance revolution, but financial and technological reasons kept it intermittent. Remarkably, enormous amounts of administrative and festival records have been maintained, from the 1930s to the present.

Films and photographs were for many years erected through the devoted efforts of staff, faculty, and students rather than a staff photographer and videographer, as is the case today. For example, during the 1950s Helen Priest Rogers filmed performances of Doris Humphrey dancers and early Merce Cunningham works, and Dora Sanders photographed classes, capturing the well-known image of sixty-four-year-old Martha Graham exhorting ADF students to contract.

A distinct video documentation program was underway by the mid-1980s, but it wasn’t until 1993 that an archivist was hired to preserve ADF other records. In fall 1993 heavy rains flooded the Durham warehouse that stored ADF’s records, photographs, films, and videos. ADF 's staff of arts administrators had no librarians or archivists in its immediate circle but recognized the tragedy of losing these materials and, with them, ADF’s history. ADF sought and received immediate help from Duke Libraries and the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. Duke library staff, especially Steven L. Hensen, worked for more than two weeks with ADF staff, separating the damaged from the merely neglected, and beginning an initial survey of materials. The North Carolina State Archives dried more than 300 record cartons of waterlogged materials.