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 The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; french: Office national du film du Canada (ONF)) is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary f ...

's ''

Highrise A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdictio ...

'' series on life in residential skyscrapers, including the 2010 world's first 360 degree

web documentary A web documentary, interactive documentary, or multimedia documentary is a documentary production that differs from the more traditional forms—video, audio, photographic—by applying a full complement of multimedia tools. The interactive multim ...

''Out My Window'', winner of the inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling at the

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the world's largest documentary film festival held annually since 1988 in Amsterdam. Over a period of twelve days, it has screened more than 300 films and sold more than 250,000 tic ...

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, 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’s

New York Film Festival The New York Film Festival (NYFF) is a film festival held every fall in New York City, presented by Film at Lincoln Center (FLC). Founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel with the support of Lincoln Center president William Schuman, i ...

Convergence program on September 30, 2013 and online at NYTimes.com in October. In April 2014, Cizek received a Peabody Award for ''A Short History of the Highrise'', followed by a

News & Documentary Emmy Award The News & Documentary Emmy Awards, or News & Documentary Emmys, are part of the extensive range of Emmy Awards for artistic and technical merit for the American television industry. Bestowed by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sci ...

in the fall of 2014. Cizek collaborated with the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

'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. At the 2016 Webby Awards, ''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 The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories includ ...

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.

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 collaborated on

academic research Research is " creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness ...

with urbanist Roger Kiel on how cities are changing, with the Global Suburbanisms program at

York University York University (french: Université York), also known as YorkU or simply YU, is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's fourth-largest university, and it has approximately 55,700 students, 7,0 ...

. 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 New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

approaches to documentary creation.

Personal life

Cizek was born in

Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo (formerly Waterloo County). Waterloo is situated about west-southwest of Toronto. Due to the close proximity of the ci ...

. The daughter of Czech immigrants, she now lives in the

Roncesvalles Roncesvalles ( , ; eu, Orreaga ; an, Ronzesbals ; french: Roncevaux ) is a small village and municipality in Navarre, northern Spain. It is situated on the small river Urrobi at an altitude of some in the Pyrenees, about from the French bor ...

district in Toronto. Cizek has a degree in

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

from

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...

in Montreal and worked as an independent filmmaker before joining the

, where she worked as a filmmaker-in-residence. Her father Jiří Čížek taught quantum physics at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

. He is known for introducing

Coupled cluster Coupled cluster (CC) is a numerical technique used for describing many-body systems. Its most common use is as one of several post-Hartree–Fock ab initio quantum chemistry methods in the field of computational chemistry, but it is also used in ...

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

*
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