Agnieszka Piotrowska

Agnieszka Piotrowska (b. ?1964, Warsaw ) is a documentary filmmaker. She was amongst the 30 most successful creative Polish people featured in the recent exhibition at the Barbican¹s Museum of London (October/November 2009) entitled London Creatives/Polish Roots organised in conjunction with the Polish Cultural Institute.

Piotrowska went to school in Sopot, Poland and Sweden. She studied at Hull University, and received a MA in Modern European Drama at Reading University with special supervision at Christ Church, Oxford.

Over the years she has interviewed Roman Polanski, David Puttnam, Micky Rourke, Sting, Oscar de la Renta, Lech Walesa, and other celebrities as well as working with convicted criminals or the dispossessed around the world, particularly in Africa.

Awards

Her first film (Three Men and a Cake), which she made as a trainee, won the Best First Film prize at BBC Television. She has since made many acclaimed documentaries. Her 2000 film about domestic violence, Cutting Edge for Channel 4, has been called a definitive piece on the subject and was nominated for BAFTA a few years ago. She has also worked on drama documentaries and in the theatre. She won the Gulbenkian Prize in 1995.

Agnieszka has been nominated three times for an Emmy (one for Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski, about the Polish-American writer who committed suicide in New York), and has been awarded international prizes and distinctions for her films, mostly for the BBC and Channel 4. From 1999 to 2004 she made a number of successful films through her own company Rivercourt Productions, mostly for National Geographic, and also occasionally acting as executive producer. She has filmed extensively in the United States and around the world. In the last couple of years, Piotrowska has returned to directing documentaries for British terrestrial channels, focusing on difficult psychological issues.

Recent work

In late 2005, Agnieszka¹s feature length documentary, Granada The Bigamists, has been critically acclaimed and won the Fred Wiseman Masterclass Award at the Dublin Film Festival. In 2006, Piotrowska's documentary Conman With 14 Wives, about international fraudster Oliver Killeen, brought his further activities to light which took place in Toronto, 2009.

Her Cutting Edge Trapped By My Twin (2007) was both the highest rating documentary in the last run of the strand and has been put forward by channel 4 for a Mental Health Award and Broadcast Award. Her documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower (Channel Five, 2008) about objectum sexuals has attracted unprecedented press attention and has been broadcast globally.

Also in 2008, she became involved with the charity Aid Armenia International, which released her documentary about Armenia (Out of the Ruins) in December 2008 with a view of raising money for the region continuously affected both by the natural disasters and struggles with the bordering Muslim Azerbaijan.

Piotrowska filmed, produced and directed the only globally-made documentary about the "Best Job in the World" phenomenon, a one hour film which was recently broadcast on BBC1 gaining the best ratings for the week.

She is collaborating with London Film Academy and is studying for a Phd in at the Psychosocial Department of Birkbeck College, University of London.

External links

• Biography
• Rivercourt Productions