Katerina Cizek helps build new things, in new ways.
From rapid prototypes to long-term studios, from specific techniques to new theories of change, from community organizing to trail-blazing programme design, Cizek excels at thinking through new paths and structures with partners. She brings together unconventional teams to co-create with people from different walks of life, diverse disciplines, and distinct systems of knowledge.
Over the decades, she has helped matchmake media and medicine, apartment residents with urban planners, artists with scientists, and scholars with makers. In her own projects, she centres equitable, evidence-based and artistic media practices to make meaning, and build towards justice.
Cizek practices facilitative leadership — supporting the leadership of team members, and an ecosystem of expertise and responsibility. She also develops and realizes knowledge-sharing models to break down barriers to learning and innovating in the 21st century.
Cizek serves as an advisor, mentor and board member across multiple organizations. She is a member of the Inaugural Interactive Board of Jurors at the Peabody Awards. At Sundance Institute, she has advised for the Stories for Change Lab (2016, 2017), the New Frontier Lab (2017, 2020), and the InterDisciplinary Program (2021). In Europe, she frequently mentors at the CPH:LAB in Copenhagen, and she helped shape and teach the programming of European Social Documentary Workshops (ESoDoc) from 2005-2020.
She has served as a visiting artist at MIT, and a distinguished visiting professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. She was also a visiting artist at USC Santa Cruz, California. She has sat on festival juries at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, One World Film Festival in Prague, Australian International Documentary Festival, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.