MO OGRODNIK
Ogrodnik started her film career working with Michael Moore, Kevin Rafferty, and Jim Ridgeway on Blood in the Face, a documentary about the emergence of the New Right and the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-west. She then went on to produce films for National Geographic Television’s, Explorer Journal – a series that put cameras in the hands of explorers from around the world. Ogrodnik was the Associate Producer on Feed – a satiric documentary about the 1988 presidential election.
Her first film, Richard and Nicole, a documentary about a trans-sexual chastised for starting a woman’s group in a Unitarian Church in Maine, won numerous festival awards and sold to WNET. Her first feature film, Ripe, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, was theatrically released, and continues to be shown on The Sundance Channel. She co-wrote, Uptown Girls, starring Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning that was released by MGM. Her most recent film, Deep Powder, starring Haley Bennet and Shiloh Fernandez, was produced by Killer Films and Gwen Bialic and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is available on Amazon and iTunes.
Ogrodnik was the Associate Dean of the Arts for NYU, Abu Dhabi where she spearheaded the Film, Music, Theater, Visual Art, and Interactive Media & Technology programs. She was instrumental in the ideation and execution of the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center, assisting in the design and vision for the physical building and the hiring of the Artistic Director. Ogrodnik was the Principal Investigator of FIND, an artistic research lab that explored transnational landscape of the GULF region through the lens of artists, scholars, and technologists. FIND’s work can also be found on the Google Cultural Institute.
Ogrodnik convened Reversible – a gathering of 35 artists from the MENASA region to share works in progress on the theme of narrating identity from the inside-out/outside in. The Reversible conference was funded by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute with support from the Sharjah Art Foundation.
GULF, her debut novel, will be published by Summit Books/Simon & Schuster (USA) and John Murray/Hachette (UK) in May of 2025.
She’s a member of the WGAE, has served as a mentor for the Sundance Labs in Jordan, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. She teaches writing and directing in the film department at New York University.