Jessica Oreck
Jessica Oreck is a filmmaker of animated films and documentaries. She admits that she always knew what she would like to do in her life – influenced by, i.a., David Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants, she attended film school and studied natural sciences: biology, ecology, botany and environmental history; later, she was hired by the Natural History Museum in New York. Interested in how people interact with nature, she calls her works “ethnobiological”, created in order to “invite viewers to question their relationship with the natural world”. Her films nominated or awarded at the cinema festivals are: Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (2009), a documentary about Japanese captivation with insects; Venus (2011), a short about the “female” planet; Aatsinki. The Story of Arctic Cowbys (2013), a documentary on Finnish reindeer herdsmen; and The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (2014), an animated film inspired by Eastern-European folklore and the character of Baba Yaga, enriched with references to such authors as Czesław Miłosz and Olga Tokarczuk.
Oreck's production company Myriapod Productions (accessed: January 28, 2018) is also strongly engaged in educational projects. Among them there are two series included in TED-Ed lessons: Mysteries of Vernacular and In a Moment of Vision..., devoted to conception and design of important devices – it covers the history of as varied inventions as, e.g., sandwich, stethoscope, bra, and Braille alphabet.
Sources:
An interview with Jessica Oreck at the Pearl Snap Discount Entertainment blog (January 28, 2011).
Profile in the IMDb database (accessed: May 24, 2018).
Twitter profile (accessed: May 24, 2018).
Bio prepared by Joanna Kłos, University of Warsaw, joanna.klos@student.uw.edu.pl
Records in database:
