Katerina Cizek is a two-time Emmy-winning documentary director working across many media platforms: digital media, broadcasting (radio and television), print and live presentations/installations. Her work has documented the Digital Revolution, and has itself become part of the movement.
At the National Film Board of Canada, she helped redefine the organization as one of the world’s leading digital content hubs, first with the Webby-winning Filmmaker-in-Residence and now, with the two-time Emmy-winning HIGHRISE. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking serial and digital projects have also garnered: a Peabody award, a World Press Photo Prize, 3 Canadian Screen Awards, an IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling, a Sheffield Doc/Fest Award, a Banff Rocky Award, a Canadian New Media Award and a BAKAFORUM Youth Education Prize. Cizek has forged unconventional, creative partnerships with such diverse organizations ranging from an inner-city teaching hospital to Mozilla Foundation, to most recently, The New York Times. Her work is also interventionist, and participatory: they have significantly contributed to conversations about health-care policy, urban planning as well as the health outcomes and living conditions of the participants themselves.
Cizek’s earlier human rights documentary film projects have instigated criminal investigations, changed UN policies, and have screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal. Cizek's films include the Hampton-Prize winner Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News (2002, co-directed with Peter Wintonick), In Search of the African Queen: A People Smuggling Operation (1999, co-director), and The Dead are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda (1995 editor, co-writer, narrator).
She is currently a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, where she is developing a new world-class production studio to incubate projects in the co-creation method. Cizek is frequently invited to travel internationally to share her innovative approach to the documentary genre.
