Andrzej Krakowski

Andrzej Krakowski is an award winning film producer, screenwriter and director. His production of a 10-episode dramatic TV series titled We Are New York, which was funded by and produced for the Mayor’s Office of New York, won two Emmy Awards in 2010.

Krakowski was born in Warsaw in 1946. His father was at different times a high-ranking politician, head of national tourism, political prisoner and finally the production head of a government owned film studio ‘Kamera’. His mother, a radio journalist, had held several important international posts in her field. His maternal grandmother was a Polish revolutionary, killed in Auschwitz, whose name is still affixed to schools, factories and streets throughout Poland. Andrzej Krakowski thus grew up surrounded by the powerful men of politics on the one hand, and the creative, often politically daring, geniuses of Polish cinema on the other. World renowned artists, writers and philosophers such as Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Ilia Ehrenburg, Nazim Hikmet, Max Frisch, Pablo Neruda, Yves Montand and Leszek Kolakowski were just a few of the many guests at the Krakowski home.

Krakowski received his education at the Polish National Film School in Łódź. He studied under several prominent film directors and worked as an intern assistant to Andrzej Wajda during the making of Ashes. Attacked in the press after the March ’68 student demonstrations, Krakowski was unexpectedly offered a scholarship in Hollywood. Shortly after his arrival in the U.S., he was stripped of his Polish citizenship and forbidden to return to his homeland. In 2014 Krakowski received a Ph.D. in Film Arts from PWSFTviT in Łódź.

In 1970, alongside David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and Jeremy Kagan, he became a producing auditor, and then fellow, at the American Film Institute. During this period he worked on and line-produced several films for his AFI colleagues: Terrence Malick's Lanton Mills, Richard Patterson’s The Open Window, Jeremy Kagan’s Love Song by Charles Faberman and Oscar Williams’ The Final Comedown, launching careers of such actors as Ron Rifkin and Billy Dee Williams. Some of those films eventually attained a cult status and are being taught at American colleges as part of film curriculum.

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