Kirsten Johnson is a documentary filmmaker and one of the only 5% of women members of the American Society of Cinematographers. Her camerawork appears in, among others, Academy Award winner Citizen Four, Academy nominated The Invisible War, and Cannes Winner Farenheit 9/11. Her film Dick Johnson is Dead premiered at Sundance 2020, where it won the Jury Prize for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling. The film won the Primetime Emmy for Directing, made the Oscar shortlist, is distributed by The Criterion Collection, and is currently showing on Netflix. Her previous film, Cameraperson, named on The New York Times “Top Ten Films of 2016” was also shortlisted for the Academy Award. Her Field of Vision short, The Above was nominated for the IDA’s ‘Best Short Award’ for 2016. Her next project is a scripted feature film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Susan Sontag.
At the Shorenstein Center, Kirsten will be working on a book project about how the internet has radically changed every person’s relationship to image-making and image-intake, and its implications for camera people. The project will investigate who films, why, under what constraints and in service of whom, with a particular eye toward the role of technology in contemporary moving image making.
