Paweł Wojtasik

Biography

Paweł Wojtasik was born in Łódź, Poland, and lived in Tunisia before coming to the United States as a refugee in 1972. He received an MFA from Yale University in 1996. From 1998 until 2000 he was a resident at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Buddhist monastery in the Catskill mountains of New York State. Wojtasik’s internationally recognized films and video installations are visionary and poetic reflections on our environment and culture. Wojtasik’s film The Aquarium (2006) deals with the destruction of the oceans; while the 360° panoramic video installation Below Sea Level (2009-2011), with soundscape by Stephen Vitiello, concerns the plight of post-Katrina New Orleans. Below Sea Level was commissioned by MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and shown there in 2009-2010 and in the PROSPECT. 2 biennial in New Orleans. Wojtasik’s Pigs (2010) was included in the 2010 New York Film Festival, and in the 2011 Berlinale — Forum Expanded. The film had its Asian premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize in the short film category. Next Atlantis (2010), with music by Sebastian Currier, premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York in January 2010. At the Still Point was a five-channel video installation shot in India and commissioned by Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. It was shown there in 2010. Another installation work, Single Stream (with Toby Lee and Ernst Karel), was presented at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2013. The single-channel version of Single Stream was shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and at the Locarno and Ann Arbor film festivals, among others. Wojtasik’s first feature film End of Life (portraying five individuals nearing the end of their lives, co-directed with John Bruce) premiered at DocLisboa in 2017, and had its U.S. premiere at the 2018 New York Film Festival. The film was selected as a candidate for the 2018 European Academy Awards. Paweł’s most recent feature film Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work, on the theme of labor, shot in Benares and Kerala, India, had its NYC premiere at The Museum of Modern Art as part of 2020 Doc Fortnight.