After eight successful years, CIRCLE is expanding and launching its first FREE CIRCLE Digital Empowerment Programme addressing women and gender-expansive filmmakers. This pilot series explores the future of interactive, immersive and synthetic media through eight online sessions with world-class creators and curators in the field. 

This new programme is open to CIRCLE alumni, members and alumni of partner organisations (find out about them here). Across the series, participants will be guided by award-winning researcher and documentarian Katerina Cizek, at the forefront of collective storytelling and emergent technologies. 

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Director of the programme Biljana Tutorov says: “It’s been exciting to see how CIRCLE has grown organically, shaped by its participants and the needs of its community as it navigates an ever-changing industry. We are very happy to welcome Katerina Cizek to our team. She will lead this new programme and bring her extraordinary artistry and experience to CIRCLE. Kat is a pioneer in the field, and her creative vision expands CIRCLE’s mission into a new realm.”

Fostering dialogue at the intersection of artistic vision and emerging technology, the programme stays true to CIRCLE’s ethos of knowledge-sharing while at the same time building professional skills. Participants will be introduced to key creative practices, technologies and cultural shifts shaping the future of storytelling - empowering CIRCLE’s alumni and partner organisations and their members to navigate and contribute to the evolving digital ecosystem. This keeps CIRCLE’s author-orientated approach at the heart of digital innovation. 

Cizek remarks: "I am honoured to join CIRCLE, and to expand its programmes into the realms of emergent media and technologies, where the voices and power of women and gender-expansive artists have never been needed more urgently."

During the inaugural session on 9 April, Cizek will give an introduction to the "Interactive, Immersive and Synthetic Landscape", referring to her rich career and experience to share the possibilities of emergent media forms for creative expression and audience connection.  

Cizek is the co-founder and artistic director of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, and the author of Collective Wisdom (MIT Press, 2022) — the world’s first field study on co-creating media. Other confirmed speakers for the CIRCLE Digital Empowerment Programme include Liz Rosenthal (CEO of Power to the Pixel and curator at the Venice International Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema); Ioana Mischie (innovative artist, multi-awarded for film, virtual reality and pioneering concepts); Rashin Fahandej (multimedia artist, immersive filmmaker, futurist and cultural activist); and Archival Producers Alliance (APA) (a collective supporting archival and media production professionals in the age of AI).

More information can be found on CIRCLE's website.