• The University of Texas at Austin, Master of Fine Arts, Radio-Television-Film

• The Pennsylvania State University, Master of Science, Geography

• Carleton College, Bachelor of Arts, Liberal Arts (Geology)

John Fiege is a filmmaker and photographer whose work explores our relationships with one

another and the environment, probing key questions at the heart of our global ecological

crisis, including how art, activism, community, and culture are vitally linked to our ecological

predicament. The animating question of his work is: how do we protect life on Earth and live

peacefully with one another, across difference?

His films have played at festivals, museums, universities, conferences, and community centers

around the world and received distribution on iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Sundance Now,

and other platforms. He has received numerous fellowships and grants, including from the

Redford Center, Doc Society, Austin Film Society, Propel Capital, Houston Endowment, Princess

Grace Foundation, The University of Texas, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Kodak, and

Smithsonian Institution. Above All Else is his feature-length documentary about the Keystone XL

pipeline that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, with an international premiere at Hot Docs.

The film won Best North American Documentary at the Global Visions Festival and a Special

Jury Prize at the Dallas International Film Festival. Mississippi Chicken, his intimate portrait of

immigrants working in the poultry industry, premiered at the Miami International Film Festival,

was nominated for a Gotham Award for “The Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,”

screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and was awarded the Grand Prize of the George H.

Mitchell Award for Excellence in Graduate Research—the top prize for the year’s graduate

dissertations and theses at The University of Texas at Austin. His short documentary, Slow

Season, about a father and son’s memories of the BP oil spill, premiered at Austin Film Festival

and screened in many coastal areas threatened by oil and gas exploration, as part of a

Working Films community screening tour, called Shore Stories. His 16mm short film, Bebe, won

the Eastman Scholarship from Kodak and screened in a student showcase at the Cannes Film

Festival.

Through his production company, Fiege Films, he works as a producer, director,

cinematographer, and photographer on a wide range of projects, with clients that include The

New York Times, MTV, PBS, CBS, Discovery Channel, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense

Fund, Planned Parenthood, Whole Foods, Smuggler, SEIU, W. Alton Jones Foundation, and

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, among other companies and organizations. He

photographed the Sundance documentary selection, No No: A Dockumentary, and has

worked on many other feature documentaries, including Reversing Roe, which premiered at the

Telluride Film Festival. Other films he photographed have played at festivals worldwide,

including Tribeca, Edinburgh, Clermont-Ferrand, San Francisco, LA, and True/False.

His still photography work as been published in a variety of magazines, books, and

newspapers, including a feature article in Orion Magazine on his photographs of the

resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline in East Texas. His I Will Vote project, which featured

large scale photographic prints and a video installation of politically active young people in

Texas, was exhibited in galleries in Austin and Houston.

He holds a BA from Carleton College, an MS in cultural geography and environmental history

from The Pennsylvania State University, and an MFA in film production from The University of

Texas at Austin, where he also worked as a lecturer. He has given guest lectures about his

work at universities and festivals around the world, including as the Bernstein Visiting Scholar

and Alumnus-in-Residence at Carleton College. He is currently Assistant Professor in the

Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.