Don’t ask Rochelle Slovin about “the MoMA thing.”

“I’m going to tell you something that may surprise you about MoMA being in Queens,” said Ms. Slovin, the founding director of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. “This museum has developed its own audience – a very strong and dedicated audience. The very presumption that MoMA brought us more audience – I’m very sensitive to that because it is assuming that we’re the weak sister and they’re the strong sister. Well, that’s true in the macro sense, but it’s not necessarily true in this sense.

“We were here, we’re still here, and we have our own audience. And we’re thriving – we really are.”

In February, the Museum of the Moving Image announced a major expansion, virtually doubling its size to nearly 100,000 square feet, adding an outdoor movie theater, a garden, an education center, and more exhibition space. The $25 million project is slated to be completed in the spring of 2008, just in time for the museum’s 20th anniversary. It opened as the American Museum of the Moving Image in September 1988, owing largely to Ms. Slovin’s efforts.

Fresh off her Columbia M.B.A., Ms. Slovin had worked for the City Planning Department and the New York City Artists Project before getting the call, in January 1981, to spearhead the redevelopment of the Astoria Studios; she was put in charge of a dilapidated building and a $90,000 budget.

Ms. Slovin met a lot of resistance when she insisted they could build a world-class institution – in Queens, no less. Board members jumped ship, and people in the industry thought she was out of her mind.

“I had this executive – a wonderful guy, actually, a chairman of an important film company – say to me, ‘Shelly, look. The movie business is interested in the bottom line; they’re not interested in history. You think you’re going to make them interested in history? You think you’re going to make a museum? It’ll never happen.'”

Despite the many naysayers, she fought on.

“It was a shocking experience,” Ms. Slovin said. “We were sitting in the Ford Foundation, and this trustee said to me, ‘Shelly, you’re crazy. You keep talking national institution, international institution – are you nuts? I don’t think I’m going to stay on this board anymore.’

“Right there, in the lobby of the Ford Foundation, he left the board, as did a bunch of other people in that period. But I don’t know why it was that I believed so strongly that it could be done. Right now, I kind of wish the expansion was already done and we were expanding again,” she said with a laugh.

Expansion had become necessary because of the museum’s overwhelming success. In addition to film festivals, gala tributes to movie stars (most recently to John Travolta and Richard Gere), and Pinewood Dialogues, in which directors give sneak previews and talk about their upcoming works, the museum features several exhibitions, including “Behind the Screen,” which traces the history of the moving image, culled from a collection of more than 150,000 artifacts.

On a sunny afternoon, Ms. Slovin is having a salad in her office, which overlooks the corner of 35th Avenue and 36th Street. She gives long, carefully thought out answers, attacking each question with vigor – the same way she approaches life.

Born in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 1940, young Rochelle Slovin put on musicals for her family, both at home and at their house in Rockaway Beach.

“I always loved performing,” she said. “I took modern dance, but modern dance is not an art form for little kids who aspire to be performers. And I can’t sing, I still can’t sing. But I loved performing, and I loved the theater.”

Her parents took her to Broadway to see such classic musicals as “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel,” and she enrolled in the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, where she studied “avant-garde-type” modern dance and theater.

“In some way, unknowingly perhaps, it turned out that I found myself at the age of 8 in an environment that was very conducive to my own ultimate adult interests and direction,” she said.

“Those were among the happiest memories that I have of my whole childhood, being actually on the stage,” she said. “That sensation of being so concentrated, of being so in your part that everything else goes away … That sensation of total immersion has stayed with me my whole life.”

Ms. Slovin performed in summer stock in college and on such experimental New York stages as La MaMa. But as much as she loves the theater, she has never been much of a film fan – even after nearly a quarter-century at the museum.

“Movies have never been my thing,” she said. “I mean, I love good movies. In the 20th and 21st centuries, you can’t be alive and not love a good movie, but movies are not really my thing. I love museums. I like technology. The whole reason we have such a strong digital media presence in this museum has to do with my interest.”

Ms. Slovin is also interested in politics – as a young girl she supported Adlai Stevenson, and later she worked with Bella Abzug – and she is proud that hundreds of thousands of adults and children have visited the museum’s online exhibition “The Living Room Candidate.”

Ms. Slovin lives on the Upper East Side with her husband, philosopher Edmund Leites, who has “been enormously helpful to me because he’s very, very smart,” she said. They read a lot, enjoy traveling, and spend time at their Shelter Island getaway. She has two sons from a previous marriage: Karl has two children and works in real estate in Los Angeles; Eric is a writer for “Saturday Night Live.”

But most of all, she is interested in her hometown.

“I love New York; I really love New York,” Ms. Slovin said. “I do everything I can. I take walks – not just in the park but up and down the streets. I love window shopping – and also some real shopping. I like to go to museums quite a bit.”

She gets excited when talking about New York, moving her hands expressively, punctuating her delight.

“I’m very interested in the city of New York and in doing something for the people of the city of New York,” she said. “Those are the things that are much more motivating to me than the movies, per se. Lots of fabulous people here know film and know film history and love the movies, and that’s as it should be.

“It would be terrible if I weren’t interested in any part of it, but really, I see this as an educational institution serving the teachers and students of New York. I see it as a gift to New York City.”