Piotr Cieplak

Piotr Cieplak is Professor of Creative Practice and Visual Cultures at the University of Sussex and author of Zofia Nowak’s Book of Superior Detecting (2025).

Piotr is a filmmaker, novelist and academic. His research consists of two main strands. The first strand is concerned with the intersection of visual media cultures with memorial, political, commemorative and justice processes related to large scale violence in the Global South. The second strand explores the narrative expressions of queerness and humour in fiction writing and film. Piotr's main methodological approach is creative practice-as-research, which results in critically-situated creative artefacts (films, photo essays, novels), alongside more traditional academic publications in journals and with academic publishers, and policy papers for think-tanks.

Piotr has written extensively about image-based representation of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, including one of the first monographs on the topic: Death|Image|Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and Its Aftermath in Photography and Documentary Film (Palgrave, 2017). His more recent work is related to photographic legacies of the Argentine civic-military dictatorship, and includes the first edited collection on the topic in English: Familiar Faces: Photography, Memory and Argentina's Disappeared (Goldsmiths/MIT Press, 2024).

Piotr's films have won awards and screened widely at international film festivals, conferences and on TV. He's the writer, director and producer of two feature documentaries about the relationship between photography and memory: The Faces We Lost (2017) – in the context of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda – and (Dis)Appear (2023) – in the context of Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983). The films received plaudits from AHRC Film Awards, The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and Learning on Screen. The Faces We Lost screened on American Public Television as part of the Afropop series.

Piotr is also the writer/director of numerous shorts, which screened at: Wicked Queer: Boston's LGBTQ+ Film Festival (USA); Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival (USA); Aesthetica International Short Film Festival (UK); San Antonio QFest-LGBT International Film Festival (USA); Queerbee LGBT Film Festival; Cambridge African Film Festival (UK); Africa-in-Motion (UK); Rwanda Film Festival; Festival International du Film Pan-Africain de Cannes (France); World Film Festival (Estonia) and Montecatini International Short Film Festival (Italy). They won awards at Avanca International Film and Video Festival (Portugal), the South Coast Film Festival (UK) and Afrykamera – International African Film Festival (Poland).

Piotr’s work has been supported by research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, The Leverhulme Trust and St John’s College, University of Cambridge.