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All Pictures (2)Biography
Alexa Karolinski was born to Canadian-German parents in 1984, grew up in Berlin and went to study art history in London. Subsequently, she worked for the German edition of multi-media scene magazine "Vice" and worked as a journalist for German-French TV station ARTE where she produced artists' portraits and cultural reports.
Eventually, she moved to New York City to study documentary film at the School of Visual Arts. Her graduate thesis film is a portrait of her Jewish grandmother and her grandmother's best friend Bella: The film documents in which ways the two friends and Holocaust survivors give meaning to their friendship and their culture through cooking together. To finance the film's production, Karolinski started a fund-raiser on the internet platform Kickstarter that proved so successful that more donations were received than necessary. "Oma & Bella" premiered at the Berlin IFF 2012 in the "Culinary Cinema" section and critics liked in unanimously. The documentary was released in German movie theatres in August 2012.
Karolinski shot the erotic music video "Lick It" (2013) for popular American TV host and sex columnist Karley Sciortino. Following the documentary short "Becoming Billy Name" (2014) about the eponymous photographer, she directed the episode "The Art of Our Time: Helen Molesworth and the MOCA Collection" for the US documentary series "Artbound".
Moreover, Karolinski made several videos for the fashion label Eckhaus Latta. She collaborated with artist Ingo Niermann on the video project "Army of Love" (2016), which was shown at the Berlin Biennale and at the Museum Castello di Rivoli. In 2017, she made the documentary "Fashion at War: Crafting the Nazi Brand", which deals with the complicity of German fashion label Hugo Boss during the Nazi reign.
She returned to feature filmmaking with the 2018 documentary "Lebenszeichen - Jüdischsein in Berlin" ("Signs of Life").