ABOUT

Meredith Zielke is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer and installation artist whose directorial work explores contested spaces and social systems. She has worked on a number of socially critical projects: from examining hybridized healing practices in the Northern Andes (“La Curación”), to large-scale tableaux of crypto-Judaic Mexican identity, historical and somatic memory (“The Jettisoned”), the 1400 year old call-to-prayer tradition in revolution torn Cairo (“Voices and Faces of the Adhan: Cairo”), and reconciliation through Jewish and Arab dialogue (“Zeitouna: Refusing to Be Enemies”) -- and media activist works: “Present Absence,” a multi-channel video installation making visible the lives of individuals killed by Chicago Police, and “Care Centered”, an advocacy film series supporting Planned Parenthood Wisconsin, immediately following their state-wide 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 Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hot Springs Film Festival, Hot Docs Digital Doc Shop, Globians Doc Fest Berlin, and is collected in the US National Library of Science. Meredith’s collaborative works have been selected for The Whitney Biennial, South by Southwest, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago History Museum (permanent exhibit), US Summer Olympics (2012), and distributed by Kino Lorber, Grasshopper Film, Journeyman Pictures, Mubi, Vdrome, POV, 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 figures, scholars, writers, skilled laborers, and spiritual practitioners. Meredith’s 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 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 center. Meredith also worked in public radio, having produced broadcast material for WBEZ / StoryCorps and WBEW Vocalo.