Welcome Prof. Nanouk Leopold

Effective April 1, 2026, Dutch director and screenwriter Nanouk Leopold has been appointed professor of fiction film and series directing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She will begin teaching in the Film/Television department at the start of the summer semester.

Regarding her future work at the KHM, she writes: “To make a film, you have to make a thousand choices. A film becomes interesting when these choices add up—when they work together to create a universe, the world of that particular film, and evoke an experience. I want to work with students to help them find their own voice, their own specific way of looking at the world, and how this can be expressed through film. I believe in practice, in getting to know your tools, and in studying others—two different paths that work simultaneously toward the main question every artist asks him or herself: what will you do, and how will you do it?”

In one of her first seminars at the KHM, “The dramatic arc of a feature film, of a miniseries, of the same material, and how to modernize a classic story,” she will examine the dramaturgy of a feature film in comparison to a miniseries adaptation with the students and focus on directing actors while working on scenes in a non-chronological order: how meaning, rhythm, and character development shift when individual moments are staged first and only later connected into an overall arc.

On Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 7 p.m., Prof. Nanouk Leopold will introduce herself to the university and the interested public in an inaugural lecture and screen her latest feature film, “Whitetail” (more information here). The feature film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Following the screening, Prof. Pia Marais will host a conversation with Nanouk Leopold about the film, her professional career, and her future teaching at the KHM.