Nicholas Pilarski is an award-winning filmmaker who co-creates interactive and emerging media. The stories he co-creates attempt to address issues related to historicized poverty and class-based trauma. Pilarski makes art that is not “about” communities, but rather “of” them - helping build ecosystems where traditional lines between subject/author, teacher/student, and spectator/producer are intentionally contested and reimagined. By developing technology with the communities he partners with, Pilarski helps materialize alternatives to media structures that often define our landscapes.
He has been profiled as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Cinema and his work has been identified as an exemplar of community-created practice by the MIT Co-Creation Studio. The collective he co-founded and co-directs, Peoples Culture, has work archived in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian: National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been nominated for the Tim Herightenton Trust’s Visionary Award three years in a row for their peacemaking and community visioning efforts in localities of geographic conflict. Pilarski has also worked as an advisor to the NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation and the Center for Court Innovation. In both roles, he continues to advocate for community storytelling to explore neighborhood-led-solutions that promote upward economic mobility and increased equity.
Pilarski’s work has appeared in The New York Times, MoMA, Eye Institute Netherlands, U.S. Departments of Interior and Education, Full Frame Documentary Festival, Aspen Shortfest, Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago International Film Festival, MIDBO Documental de Bogotá, Athens International Film Festival, Human Rights Film Festival NYC/Paris/Barcelona, Festival International du Film Pan Africain de Cannes, Ann Arbor Film Festival, DOXA, and is archived in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian Institution: National Museum of African American History and Culture.