Conversations from the Sundance Institute Labs | Iterative Practice and Collaboration with Sarah Ellis, Nick Fortugno & more

Katerina (Kat) Cizek is a two-time Emmy-winning director of creative-tech documentaries rooted in co-creation. She is currently the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. At the studio, she co-wrote the world’s first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom. At MIT, she facilitates co-creation by ways of delegations, workshops and fellowships. In 2020, the studio is hosting both an Indigenous Digital delegation in partnership with the Indigenous Screen Office, and a Mozilla Open Web fellow. The studio has also run a series of on-campus and virtual co-creation workshops fusing art, documentary, and journalism together with science and tech, with a focus on collective creation. For over a decade, Cizek worked at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects Highrise and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered a Peabody Award, a World Press Photo Prize, 3 Canadian Screen Awards, among others, as well as international critical acclaim. Cizek has served as an advisor to Sundance Institutes’ New Frontier Story Lab (2018) and Stories of Change Program (2016-2018). She is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, and a member of the new Peabody Digital Board. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University’s Faculty of Communication and Design in Toronto, Canada.

Nick Fortugno is an entrepreneur, interactive narrative designer and game designer based in New York City. He is a founder and principal of Playmatics, an interactive development company. Playmatics has created a variety of digital and real-world experiences for organizations including ProPublica, Red Bull, AMC (such as the CableFAX award winning BREAKING BAD: THE INTERROGATION), Disney, American Museum of Natural History, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. For the past ten years, Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster DINER DASH and the award-winning serious game AYITI: THE COST OF LIFE. Nick is a Lead Artist on the FRANKENSTEIN A.I. project (featured at the Sundance Film Festival New Frontier program in 2018), and has worked extensively on interactive narrative projects in a variety of formats. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam since 2006, and co-creator of the Big Urban Game for Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2003. Nick has taught game design and interactive narrative design for 15 years at institutions such as Columbia University and the Parsons School of Design, and has participated in the creation of game design and immersive storytelling curriculum. Some of Nick's writing about interactive narrative can be found in the anthology WELL-PLAYED 1.0: VIDEO GAME, VALUE, AND MEANING, published by ETC-Press. 

Melissa Painter heads MAP Lab. She has deep experience in narrative design, augmented and virtual reality, content strategy, interaction design, storytelling, both cinematic and live, and in leading large and small teams in creative collaboration. MAP is focused on the intersections of emergent technologies and human intent and on employing design to tackle challenges of today and the future.

Painter is an award-winning filmmaker and author. Her work has been featured at Sundance, New York Film Festival, Unity Vision Summit, Future of Storytelling, The Huntington Library, and Botanical Gardens, Siggraph, Cannes, CES, SXSW, on Microsoft Holo Lens, Magic Leap, Gear VR Oculus store, and Windows Mixed Reality. 

MAP’s strategic partners and funders include: Microsoft, lululemon, Nike, Clif Bar, NASA, Unity Technologies, Intel, Boeing, Oculus, AMD, HP, San Francisco Bay School, Technicolor, USC Center for Body Computing, and NVIDIA. 

Painter has been selected as a Fellow of both the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and Sundance Directors Lab, and as a mentor of Sundance’s New Frontiers Lab. She has directed three feature films, and over 150 short form documentaries focused on innovation, education, and social justice. Melissa holds a BA in Ancient Greek from Columbia University where she graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa, and an MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  

Chosen Interviews:

• David Bowie’s Heroes Inspires Quest into New Technologies at Sundance 2017
• Heroes // Shift

Creative Resources:

• http://opendoclab.mit.edu/
• https://nycmedialab.org/
• http://longnow.org/
• Poetry: The Poetry Foundation
• City Architecture + Mapping: http://rebeccasolnit.net/, https://www.spur.org/
• All of the LA Museums: https://hammer.ucla.edu/
• Jim Hodge: https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2014/jim-hodges-give-more-than-you-take/, http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/3d-double-vision
• Dancers: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2017/common-time, http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/merce-cunningham-clouds-and-screens
• Earth Artists/Light Artists: http://jamesturrell.com/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrGMkXukeEo
• Athletes: High School Basketball in LA, Track, Adventure Athletes
• Music: All

Sarah Ellis is an award-winning producer currently working as Director of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company to explore new artistic initiatives and partnerships. The latest partnership for the RSC is the Audience of the Future Live Performance Demonstrator funded by Innovate UK - a consortium consisting of arts organizations, research partners and technology companies to explore the future of performances and real-time immersive experiences. In 2017, she became a fellow of the University of Worcester for her work in the arts and technology. In 2016 she was awarded The Hospital Club & Creatives Industries award for cross industry collaboration for her work on the RSC's The Tempest in collaboration with Intel and in association with The Imaginarium Studios. In 2013 she was listed in the top 100 most influential people working in Gaming and Technology by The Hospital Club and Guardian Culture Professionals. In partnership with Google, she produced Midsummer Night's Dreaming winning two Lovie Awards for Innovation and Experimentation. She is a regular speaker and commentator on digital arts practice, as well as an Industry Champion for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, which helps inform academic research on creative industries to lead to better policies for the sector. She has been appointed Chair of Digital Agency, The Space, established by Arts Council England and the BBC to help promote digital engagement across the arts.