At a ceremony in New York City last night, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out the 35th batch of News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Among the winners: A Short History of the Highrise, an interactive documentary on “vertical living” directed by Katerina Cizek, a member of MIT’s Visiting Artists Program, and co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Op-Docs section of The New York Times.
The executive producers of the project are Silva Basmajian at the National Film Board of Canada and Jason Spingarn-Koff at The New York Times. Spingarn-Koff is the newspaper’s commissioning editor for opinion video, and producer and curator for Op-Docs, the Times’ series of short opinion documentairies by independent filmmakers. He was a Knight Fellow at MIT in 2010-2011.
A Short History of the Highrise, which documents life in residential skyscrapers in cities and suburbs around the world, won the News & Documentary Emmy in the category New Approaches: Arts, Lifestyle, Culture. (The New York Times had a pretty good shot at winning the …