A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Meredith sits on a royal blue bench in front of a tiled wall. She wears jeans with holed in the knees, cuffed above brown boots.

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Meredith Zielke

Associate Professor, Adjunct

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Bio

Meredith Zielke is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer and installation artist whose directorial work explores contested spaces, social systems, and the possibilities of cinema. She has worked on a number of socially critical projects: from hybridized healing practices in the Northern Andes, to large-scale tableaux vivants exploring history, somatic memory and crypto-Judaic identity in Mexico City and Warsaw, the 1400 year old call-to-prayer tradition in revolution torn Cairo, reconciliation through Jewish and Arab dialogue, multichannel video installation as a method of conjuring the living presence of people killed by Chicago police, and advocacy documentary supporting Planned Parenthood Wisconsin, immediately following their abortion ban.

Meredith’s feature length directorial debut, “A Machine to Live In” about state and cult power in Brasília premiered at Visions du Réel and True/ False Film Festival in 2020. Meredith’s directorial works have exhibited in numerous international festivals, galleries, and conferences - including Museum of the Moving Image, Torino Film Festival, Montreal International Documentary Festival RIDM, Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Osaka International Film Festival, Norwegian International Film Festival, MOSTRA São Paulo International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Hot Docs Digital Doc Shop, Globians Doc Fest Berlin, 6018NORTH – and is collected in the US National Library of Science and the University of Cambridge Library. Meredith’s collaborative works have been selected for The Whitney Biennial, Berlinale, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, South by Southwest, Krakow Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago History Museum (permanent exhibition), 2012 US Summer Olympics, UnionDocs, and distributed by Kino Lorber, Grasshopper Film, Journeyman Pictures, Video Data Bank, Media Burn Archive, Mubi, Vdrome, POV (PBS), and Field of Vision.

Meredith co-founded The Quito Film Collective, Standing Point Films, and A Machine to Live In LLC - each a collaboration of filmmakers, visual artists, cultural workers, skilled laborers, historians, writers, and cartographers. Meredith’s [shared] awards include: Docs in Progress Pitch Award (Visions du Réel), Finishing Award (Nordisk Panorama), Espera Productions Grant (Luxembourg), the SFFILM 2017 Documentary Film Fund, Graham Foundation Grant to Individuals, the Filmmaker Fund Grant, Gelman Travel Fellowship, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation Grant, PBS Silvers Award for Independent Film (Co-Editor), Invited participant: Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Documentary Labs, IFP’s Independent Film Week Forum, DOK.Incubator (Czech Republic, Sweden, Slovakia), and Featured Filmmaker at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (“A Machine to Live In” and “Present Absence”), and Doc Chicago Conference.

In 2018, Meredith was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces” of independent cinema. In 2019, she co-founded the PO Box Collective, a social-practice radical art collective and mutual aid community center. Meredith also worked in public radio, having produced broadcast material for StoryCorps (WBEZ) and Vocalo WBEW.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course is designed to introduce students to the language and histories of the moving image arts and the diverse ways in which artists have contributed to them. Throughout the semester we will examine a range of approaches to creating moving image work. We will compare and contrast established ?norms? with radical and experimental approaches to these various media, leading to an understanding of the rich, complex, and evolving landscape upon which individuals have been making, and continue to make, moving image art.

Students will engage with this expanded field through lectures, readings, screenings, meetings with visiting artists as well as becoming active in discussions and practitioners in the field via group projects.

Working in small groups, students will complete a series of short projects to introduce them to the various pathways of the department. By the end of the semester, students should have gain basic production and postproduction skills as well a good understanding of the key concepts relevant to contemporary film, video, new media, installation and animation.

Class Number

1437

Credits

3

Description

This is an intensive studio course for advanced students of film/video to explore the creative uses of light in their projects. Through the examination of cinematographic approaches across the various genres including narrative, experimental, and documentary, students apply advanced techniques of lighting and composition to their work. Emphasis is placed on the changing role of the cinematographer in the world of digital media.

Class Number

1609

Credits

3

Description

This is an intensive studio course for advanced students of film/video to explore the creative uses of light in their projects. Through the examination of cinematographic approaches across the various genres including narrative, experimental, and documentary, students apply advanced techniques of lighting and composition to their work. Emphasis is placed on the changing role of the cinematographer in the world of digital media.

Class Number

1441

Credits

3

Description

This advanced-level production course introduces students to two methodologies of large-scale moving-image making--hierarchical and collaborative. Following a project-selection process based on a submitted student proposals/scripts, students will perform roles as part of a production team, shifting responsibilities between 2 selected projects. Projects created will explore pre-production and production in traditional or hybrid narrative, documentary, experimental and/or installation-based forms. The course will include site-visits and in-class visits from production and curatorial specialists.

Class Number

1447

Credits

3

Description

This course is designed to acquaint first year, first semester Film, Video, New Media, and Animation (FVNMA) graduate students with the technical and conceptual aspects of the FVNMA department and to prepare students for their first formal critique. Students get authorized on FVNMA equipment and facilities.

Some examples drawn from contemporary art and current theoretical materials will be considered for discussion.

Students will have to write a project proposal and present work in progress in preparation for critique week. A group project at the beginning of the semester will introduce students to the available equipment and facilities.

Class Number

1608

Credits

3