John Fiege

Roles: Director

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.