Katerina Cizek is a Canadian documentary director and a pioneer in digital documentaries. She is the Artistic Director, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

''Highrise''

From 2008-2015, Cizek directed the National Film Board of Canada's '' Highrise'' series on life in residential skyscrapers, including the 2010 world's first 360 degree web documentary ''Out My Window'', winner of the inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and an International Digital Emmy for best digital program: non-fiction, and the 2011 webdoc ''One Millionth Tower'', which lets users explore a highrise complex in 3D

virtual space Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

, as Toronto residents re-imagine their neighborhood. ''A Short History of the Highrise'' is an interactive documentary that "explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world." The centerpiece of the project is four short films by Cizek—''Mud'', ''Concrete'' and ''Glass''—with images culled from ''The New York Timess visual archives, that are "intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation." The fourth short film, ''Home'', is being made with user-submitted images. The interactive site will incorporate the films and also offer additional archival materials, text and microgames. It premiered as part of the

Film Society of Lincoln Center Film at Lincoln Center, previously known as the Film Society of Lincoln Center until 2019,Aridi, Sara (April 28, 2019).. ''The New York Times''. nytimes.com. Retrieved April 29, 2019. is a film society based in New York City, United States. Fo ...

’s New York Film Festival Convergence program on September 30, 2013 and online at NYTimes.com in October. In April 2014, Cizek received a

Peabody Award The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, honor the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in television, radio, and ...

for ''A Short History of the Highrise'', followed by a News & Documentary Emmy Award in the fall of 2014. Cizek collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenDocLab unit to develop the final production in the ''Highrise'' project called ''Universe Within''. As part of MIT’s Visiting Artists Program, she worked with scholars and apartment residents to ask how new technological forms are reshaping personal lives in suburban high-rise communities.
''Universe Within''
is the final iteration of NFB Highrise, directed by Cizek and co-created with Digital Agency Secret Location and Dr. Deborah Cowen and Dr. Emily Paradis. On March 8, 2016, ''Universe Within'' received the award for Best Original Interactive Production Produced for Digital Media at the

4th Canadian Screen Awards Fourth or the fourth may refer to: * the ordinal form of the number 4 * ''Fourth'' (album), by Soft Machine, 1971 * Fourth (angle), an ancient astronomical subdivision * Fourth (music), a musical interval * ''The Fourth'' (1972 film), a Sovie ...

. At the

2016 Webby Awards The 20th annual Webby Awards for 2016 was held at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on May 16, 2016, which was hosted by comedian and actor Nick Offerman. The awards ceremony was streamed live on the Webby Awards website. Judges from the Intern ...

, ''Universe Within'' received the Webby for Online Film & Video/Best Use of Interactive Video.

''Filmmaker-in-Residence''

Prior to working on ''Highrise'', Cizek directed an NFB crossmedia documentary project about life inside Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. Called ''Filmmaker-in-Residence'', it garnered a Webby Award for Best Documentary Series.

Other credits

Prior to joining the NFB, her films included '' Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News'', co-directed with

Peter Wintonick Peter Kenneth Wintonick (June 10, 1953 – November 18, 2013) was a Canadian independent documentary filmmaker based in Montreal. A winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, former Thinker in Residence for the Premie ...

Research and teaching

She is currently heading up a new research and production initiative at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Cizek and NFB producer

Gerry Flahive Gerry is both a surname and a masculine or feminine given name. As a given name, it is often a short form (hypocorism) of Gerard, Gerald or Geraldine. Notable people with the name include: Surname *Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814), fifth US vice presi ...

collaborated on academic research with urbanist Roger Kiel on how cities are changing, with the Global Suburbanisms program at York University. Cizek collaborated closely with an academic team at University of Toronto on the final iteration of HIGHRISE, on a joint book and documentary project about Digital Citizenship in the Global Suburbs. Cizek is a long-time teacher at the annual ESoDoc workshops. She teaches new media approaches to documentary creation.

Personal life

Cizek was born in Waterloo, Ontario. The daughter of Czech immigrants, she now lives in the Roncesvalles district in Toronto. Cizek has a degree in anthropology from McGill University in Montreal and worked as an independent filmmaker before joining the National Film Board of Canada, where she worked as a filmmaker-in-residence. Her father

Jiří Čížek Jiří Čížek (born 1938) is a distinguished emeritus professor at University of Waterloo in Canada. Together with colleague Josef Paldus, in 1966 he reformulated the coupled cluster method (originally developed in the 1950s for nuclear phys ...

taught

quantum physics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, qua ...

at the University of Waterloo. He is known for introducing Coupled cluster theory.J. Čížek, ''On the Correlation Problem in Atomic and Molecular Systems. Calculation of Wavefunction Components in Ursell-Type Expansion Using Quantum-Field Theoretical Methods'', The Journal of Chemical Physics 45, 50 (1966)

References

External links

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Watch films by Katerina Cizek at the National Film Board of CanadaInterview with Katerina Cizek
Digital Media Architecture Urbanism, Amsterdam
Katerina Cizek
Open Documentary Lab, MIT
Katerina Cizek
Visiting Artists Program, MIT {{DEFAULTSORT:Cizek, Katerina Canadian women film directors Canadian documentary film directors National Film Board of Canada people McGill University alumni People from Waterloo, Ontario Canadian people of Czech descent 1969 births Living people Emmy Award winners Canadian digital artists Women digital artists Digital media educators Peabody Award winners Web designers 21st-century Canadian women artists Women graphic designers Canadian women documentary filmmakers