Krzysztof Pijarski

Faculty of Design, SWPS University Visual Narratives Laboratory ORCID SCOPUS ID

Visual artist, researcher, educator, curator, and producer. Associate professor at the Faculty of Design / SWPS University, where he is chair of artistic and design research; member of the Visual Narratives Laboratory (which co-founded and co-directed in 2019-2024) at the Film School in Lodz (https://vnLab.org), where he taught in 2009-2025. The vnLab is a media lab focused on the evolution of visual storytelling into such areas as XR, stereoscopic 3D, interactive web-based pieces, or the film essay. A big part of his work at the vnLab was focused on the Interactive Narratives Studio, where he worked on developing webdocs and other narrative and archival interactive pieces, especially in the transmedial space. His interests lie above all in exploring convincing visual forms of thinking by way of visual essays, atlases, analogies. He likes working between fact and fiction, with visual intelligence, distance, and the ability of going beyond the established uses and conventions of photography. Out of his engagement with bound content, he initiated the PubLab Collective around his vision for web publications as an evolution of the printed book.

Recipient of a Fulbright Junior Research Grant at Hohns Hopkins University (2009-2010), and grants, among others, from the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and the Shpilman Institute of Photography. Headed and partcipated in grants from the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, the National Science Centre, and the National Programme for the Development of Humanities.

Authored a monograph on modernism as seen through the the dual prism of the figure of Michael Fried and photography as a technology that changed our understanding of art (Archeologia modernizmu. Michael Fried i nowoczesne doświadczenie sztuki [An Archeology of Modernism. Michael Fried, Photography, and the Modern Experience of Art], 2017), as well as (Post)Modern Fate of Images: Allan Sekula / Thomas Struth (2013). Edited the volumes Ludzie i rzeczy: „Zapis socjologiczny” Zofii Rydet (2022), Object Lessons: Zofia Rydet’s „Sociological Record” (2017), and The Archive as Project (2011). A collection of his translations of essays by Allan Sekula was published by the Warsaw University Press in 2010.