Founded in 2016, the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab researches and incubates collective creation as alternatives to singular authorship. For our studio, co-creation can happen within communities, across disciplines and with non-human systems such as Artificial Intelligence. Our book on the subject, called Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice will be published in Fall 2022 with MIT Press. The studio is part of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative and immersive storytelling.
As centers for documentary research, the lab and studio offer courses, workshops, a fellows program, public lectures, and conferences; we incubate experimental projects; and we develop resources and critical discourse. Projects incubated at our lab and studio have premiered at Sundance, Venice, Tribeca festivals and have won Emmy, Webby along with many other global awards. In the spirit of MIT’s open courseware and open source software movements, the Open Documentary Lab is inclusive, collaborative and committed to sharing knowledge, networks, and tools.
Working with lab and studio Principal Investigators William Uricchio and Vivek Bald, and lab director Sarah Wolozin, Katerina Cizek is the studio’s head. She supports fellows, and designs and runs workshops and research to envision new ways to support collective creation in the field.