Meet Katarin Parizek

Here to help you find clarity so you can create a new and different personal story.

I was born a few hundred feet from “the Big Spring” in Bellefonte, PA, a spring that originally gave Bellefonte its name (Beautiful Fountain). 

Image by Craig Stewart

Since birth, environmental awareness, the environment, water and water pollution problems have ebbed and flowed throughout my life. Archeology, water, the environment and environmental pollution issues often show up in my research and photographic work.

As a young child, I was often taken out of school and brought to different places in our world for months at a time. For this reason, I grew up with a broad inquisitive mind and a multi-cultural awareness, questioning and learning in an experiential way. I learned many languages and still have many close childhood friends who live all around the world.

I am sincerely a passionate caring world citizen. The world is my home and my backyard. My interests are broad and diverse: art, language, music, poetry, literature, history, ancient civilizations, customs, cultures, myths, legends, rituals, astrology, (sometimes religions) fascinate me. I love people and am passionate when creating environmental portraits. I am a visual storyteller, drawn to people, trusted and invited into their world. I am fascinated and truly want to learn from everyone’s life experiences.

So far, I’ve been to 5 continents and worked and lived in 64 countries. In 27 countries the work was related to water pollution and environmental issues and the rest were photographic based trips. I often lived in these countries returning back to these countries for extended periods of time.

When I teach, no matter where, I try to get my students to look at the world that surrounds them and find their own stories photographing the people and places that make up their world.

My goal for all of my classes is to move students from being passive recipients, towards becoming well-informed, active participants.

I regard the "real world" as the ideal classroom environment that offers invaluable experiences.

 Image by Amber Herr

For this reason, I am constantly striving to expand beyond the classroom and imbed my students in real world experiences weaving these experiences into my teaching.

 

My advanced students are expected to enter into real world settings and situations, give oral presentations, do research, find and create their own stories. This hands-on approach encourages independent learning and is designed to expose students to unique photographic experiences. 

You may be wondering what qualifies me to help you do this deep work.

 

  • Through time, my images have become more critical and informative. I was the official photographer of a six person USAID team that studied the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in an effort to help give advice to the former USSR scientists on how to contain the radioactive waters so that radioactive waters did not flow from the Pripet to the Dnieper, polluting the population of Kiev, later ending up in the Black sea and the Mediterranean sea. During this time, I photographed in and around Chernobyl.

    After a year and ½ of exhibiting and photographing in Bolivia as a Fulbright Scholar, I was an invited artist representing Bolivia at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, Canada. It was when I was exhibiting at that Summit that was attended by all of the Presidents of the Americas except for Fidel Castro (who was not invited), that I realized my images, if put in the right places, could have an influence on International Public Policy.

    Not only have I been embedding my photographs heavily in invited lectures at Public Policy conferences run by UNESCO in Rome Italy, Denver Colorado, and Vancouver Canada, I have also lectured at Universities in Aswan, Cairo, and Qena, Egypt. I was invited to participate in International Greening Education Event (IGEE) Education for Sustainability Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. I have also helped create sustainability conferences at Penn State.

  • I have 24 years of extensive training and professional shooting experience using digital photography. For 10 years I have taught strictly digital photography. My digital training began with the first digital classes taught at Penn State. However, since digital photography is constantly evolving, active participation in continuing education is extremely important. I have taken three workshops from John Paul Caponigro including: (1) The Fine Art Digital Print, (2) Digital Portfolio, and (3) The Power of Color. In addition, I have participated in numerous seminars at Photo Plus Expo in New York City during: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Prior to 2005, I taught traditional darkroom courses, silver processes in black and white, C-41, E-6, Ilfachrome, Cibachrome printing and processing in color. I also taught the zone system and book design.

    In 2005, I was hired by Bill Kelly, the former head of the Integrative Arts Department at Penn State University, to teach digital photography beyond the arts, integrating photography with other disciplines throughout Penn State University, to help create the upper level courses of the new digital photography curriculum and teach digital photography exclusively. I was hired to help develop and teach new digital photography courses at Penn State. I helped to develop Penn State’s existing photography program. For this reason, I have 10 years of solid integrative digital photography teaching experience and 11 years of studio lighting teaching experience. I started teaching studio lighting courses at Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE and introduced studio lighting knowledge to Penn State in 2005. I created the beginning and advanced studio lighting courses at Penn State and taught them exclusively for five years. I continued teaching the basics of studio lighting as part of a section of PHOTO 200 until 2014.

  • During my 9 years at Penn State, Keith Shapiro and I developed the Digital Photography program and I personally created the curriculum for and taught 10 courses all of which to my knowledge are still being offered today:

    • PHOTO 410 Athletic-Sports Photography

    • PHOTO 300 Fine Art Printing Photography

    • PHOTO 400 Advanced Studio Lighting Photography

    • PHOTO 200 Beginning Photography

    • PHOTO 497A Photography and The Environment

    • PHOTO 497 Portfolio Preparation Course

    • INART 299 Beginning: Photographing Italian Culture in Rome

    • INART 499 Advanced: Photography Independent Projects

    • PHOTO 299 Beginning: Photographing Italian Culture in Rome

    • PHOTO 499 Advanced: Photographing Italian Culture in Rome

  • In 2010, I was presented with the opportunity to teach the Summer INART Rome program. At first this 6 credit, 6-week program taught photography and architectural history as well as exposed the students to other cultures, history, major Renaissance and Baroque artists and their artwork. These courses were taught mostly to non-art majors. This was a very eye-opening experience for me. First, I became acutely aware of how few of our students have traveled outside Pennsylvania, and of how little most students knew about anything non-US: politics, geography, history, famous artists. One student, a senior international business major, told me that I showed him all of his ninja turtles. Before my class, he sincerely equated Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael with cartoon characters instead of artists. It was then that I realized how important this international experience was for the students and I made it a point to try to run the program every year. In the short six weeks, my students quickly transformed from being scared of the unknown and following me around like "ducklings", to feeling like an outsider looking in, to ultimately feeling as though they lived in Rome. I watched them grow and was excited to be able to help them in that maturing process. Similar experiences were observed when working with Penn State graduate and undergraduate students as part of the Hierakonpolis Temple-Town project in Egypt. These can be meaningful, life-changing experiences.

    During the summer of 2013, I was asked to recreate the Study Abroad INART ROME Program, presently Photographing Italian Culture with IES as a new provider. During the summer of 2014, I taught both PHOTO 299 as well as PHOTO 499. A new second course INART 299, an Italian film course taught by Prof. Elisabetta Lodoli, was added. The film course had a 2-week component, which analyzed Italian Films. The remaining time was dedicated to film production, where the students recreated a scene. I was responsible for leading all of the field expeditions in Rome as well as the week-long trip to Florence and Venice.

My mission is to help you uncover a deep layer of understanding within yourself through working with images.

Through this deep work, you are able to see what makes your individual thread unique within our world.

Begin your insight journey