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A light-skinned man with a full beard, a mustache, and round glasses —Kirill Mazor—smiles slightly as he leans upon a stone railing, quadrilateral artworks in single shades hung behind him. A light-skinned man with a full beard, a mustache, and round glasses —Kirill Mazor—smiles slightly as he leans upon a stone railing, quadrilateral artworks in single shades hung behind him.

Kirill Mazor, Creative Director, Digital Content, Experience Design

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I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Kirill on experiential projects and digital content for over a decade.

His enthusiasm for the work he does here at the museum is contagious, and he’s got serious production chops, both of which make him an absolute pleasure as a colleague. Meet Kirill Mazor, who sat down with me recently to talk all about what it means to be a storyteller through digital media at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gina: Hello, Kirill. Thanks for being here today.

Kirill: Happy to be here.

Gina: So we’ve worked together for over ten years at this point. 

Kirill: Yeah. 

Gina: My joke is that we haven’t aged a day, somehow.

Kirill: Magic! 

Kirill Mazor, in a blue button-down shirt, walks alongside Gina Giambalvo, a light-skinned woman with long brown hair who wears a grey sweater. They are flanked by stone columns, and before them is a stone railing. Behind them, large geometric artworks, one yellow and one blue, hang on the wall.

Gina Giambalvo and Kirill Mazor on the balcony of the Upper Rice building with works from Ellsworth Kelly’s The Chicago Panels, 1989–99


Gina: To fill the readers in: we worked at a creative studio together before we worked together here. And at that studio, we produced videos for the Art Institute.

Kirill: Yeah. This was before the museum started producing most of its videos in-house. It’s also how I discovered I was good at making content about art and that it was something I found interesting. It helped lay the groundwork for what I do now. 

Gina:
Let’s get into that: How would you describe your role here to someone unfamiliar with it?

Kirill: Well my title is creative director of digital content, and, like it sounds, I’m responsible for the creative vision and execution of most of our digital content. This includes in-gallery videos and audio tours for our exhibitions, plus videos for social media and things like interactive virtual tours. Essentially, I’m somebody that helps tell stories. You and I, along with our colleagues on Experience Design’s digital production and content teams, work closely with our curatorial departments and Marketing to tell stories about exhibitions, artworks, and the museum itself. 

Kirill Mazor, wearing a headset, operates a large video camera affixed with a screen. He wears a look of total concentration.

Gina: Great summary. So how did you get your start?

Kirill: Not too surprisingly, I went to school for film. I think we both came from Columbia College Chicago, albeit at different times.

Gina: Right. 

Kirill: When I was in high school in Memphis, I ran our school’s video and TV program, and it clicked in me that this was something that I might want to do as an actual job. Columbia seemed like an easy choice, since they have a stellar film program and I already loved Chicago. I got to work on a variety of different film and art projects there—I even curated my own art exhibition—and from then on I knew I wanted to keep doing that kind of experiential work. 

Gina: What came next? 

Kirill: My initial goal when I graduated was to find any work available. Editing film seemed like the natural path for me, since I had a lot of experience doing it already, and I spent a couple of years working as an assistant editor and postproduction supervisor on narrative and documentary films. This brought me to New York City and even abroad, to Tel Aviv. But I still had that interest in experiential design.

Gina: How did you end up exploring it further?

Kirill: I got lucky and won a grant to make an art installation for the Electric Forest music festival, in Rothbury, Michigan. 

Gina: You’ve shared photos of that with me before. Looked like a fun project.

Kirill: Yeah. My team and I created an interactive projection-mapped sculpture in the form of a polygonal brain hanging in the forest. When triggered by the RFID chip in the wristband that all attendees wore, the sculpture would generate a custom visual just for them.

Gina: It must have been incredible to see it in action.

A large bean-shaped sculptural artwork hangs suspended in the air. A geometric pattern in shades of gray and white is projected upon it. It seems to glow. In front of the art object, their backs to us, are two light-skinned men who reach their arms up toward the object as though discussing it.

Working on the interactive installation Cerebrum for the Electric Forest festival, 2013


Kirill: It was so much fun, and it was a big success. After that, my now wife started grad school in Chicago, so I returned here with her and began working at the agency where you and I met, as a video editor. From there you know the story: I spent four years working on interactive installations and video content for big brands and then came to the Art Institute, around the same time you did, to lead the digital content team. That was about five years ago.

Gina: What would you say the biggest differences are between working at an agency and working at a museum?

Kirill: I love that we have a relatively small team here compared to an agency, and that allows us each to wear a lot of hats. At an agency there’s much more division of labor. You, for instance, are our digital studio director, which requires you to have a big-picture perspective and manage strategy and budgets and things like that, but you’re a hands-on producer as well. That would be really unusual at an agency.

Gina: Yeah. The day-to-day managing of a project is something I still do, both because we are a small and scrappy team and need to to cover all of our projects but also because I like it—I love to see a project go all the way from request to delivery. 

Kirill: Me too. I also like that every single person we work with—every curator, every conservator—is someone we’ll likely be working with again, which typically isn’t the case at an agency. Over time, that allows us to build trust and deepen relationships, which I find so rewarding. 

Gina: I totally agree. Maybe you could talk a little about how you build that trust. 

Kirill: One thing I do is I always try to be the most excited person in the room.

Gina: I would say you’re successful at that. Which is saying something, because we work with some really passionate people!

Kirill: Yeah. The curators—they’ve maybe been thinking about an idea for years before we ever speak with them about it, and they come in with so much enthusiasm. They can’t wait to share what they’ve been working on.

Facing each other in profile, Gina Giambalvo, at left, and Kirill Mazor, at right, lean against a stone railing while flanked by columns and appear to be in conversation.

Gina: I think I know the answer to this, but do you ever feel pressure to come into those conversations with ideas right off the bat? 

Kirill: I actually don’t like knowing that much in advance. Not knowing frees me up to ask all sorts of silly questions I might not otherwise think to ask—about the project, or even just basic things about the artist or the time period that might open an important door for us creatively. 

Gina: I agree that it can be an advantage to not know very much going in. That way we don’t assume too much knowledge on the part of our audience. 

Kirill: Yeah. I like to listen first in any case. Ultimately I think people make the best things when they are in a highly collaborative environment where no one is too set on any one idea to begin with.

Gina: In addition to being a good listener, you’re probably the most organized person I’ve ever met. Does that come naturally, or have you forced yourself into certain habits?

Kirill: Oh, man. I feel like I spend a lot of my life being incredibly disorganized. But with a creative role, you have to be ready to turn it on when it’s time to work. So I have some tricks I’ve learned to sort of empty my brain of everything that’s not needed for the task at hand. And I block time, set calendar reminders, anything that helps give me some structure. 

These days I need to be especially organized and careful with my time, because I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, Dmitry. Thankfully, my wife is also incredibly organized, but in totally different ways. We balance each other out. 

Gina: What would you say is one of your most memorable projects here?

Kirill: For the exhibition Canova: Sketching in Clay, we got to work with a sculptor in Vermont to recreate the method Canova used, which involved starting with little clay models and translating them into large marble sculptures. The sculptor that we worked with was incredible. It was the first time that he had seen his work represented this way. I think it was really meaningful for him, which made it even more special for us.

Thumbnail Canova Onlineversion Web

An in-gallery video accompanying the 2023 exhibition Canova: Sketching in Clay


Gina: Agreed. Seeing that footage come together was really exciting. 

Kirill: Another project that I’m really proud of is a fully animated series from several years ago that we called Playing Favorites. We asked staff members to highlight their favorite objects and created a visual style that looked like people sketching in a notebook. I remember the first episode really well. It was with—

Gina: Cybele?

Kirill: Yeah, Cybele.

Gina: I love that one. 

Kirill: She was one of our conservators back then. She spoke about a reliquary in our medieval galleries—an object I’d never heard of before. The audio was so emotional. It was about the distance between people. I remember hearing the first cut and knowing I was where I was supposed to be. Making content like that is why I came to the museum.

Cybele Titlecard

From the 2020 online video series Playing Favorites


I realized that I want to tell very human stories. I think that’s what people connect to. Sometimes museums can feel like high-walled places, like there’s a barrier of entry when it comes to knowledge or status or even wealth. Telling stories can be a way to get around all that and remind us that art is for everyone.

Gina: Absolutely. Speaking of new formats, lately we’ve been making new digital shorts for our social media channels.

Kirill: I’m so excited about them. I should probably give a little background, right?

Gina: Go for it. 

Kirill: So sometimes we’ll be walking through the galleries with a colleague, and they’ll mention an absolutely amazing fact about the museum or a specific object that we didn’t know before. This happens all the time around here. We trade fun facts. And we realized while talking with our colleagues in Marketing that this is the sort of thing we should be sharing with our audiences online. So we tried to package that kind of insider experience into a short video format designed specifically for social media.

We’ve made a number of these shorts so far, and one of our most successful showcases one of our Great Wave prints, which is currently on view again after five years in storage. Prints can only be on view for short periods of time every five years, so they don’t fade from light exposure, and we thought it would be fun to show The Great Wave coming out of the drawer that it’s stored in. The video broke a million views, which was a first for us. So we’ll definitely be making a lot more videos like it going forward.

Great Wave Still 1

A 2024 video short for social media highlighting Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave (detail), from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), about 1830–33. Clarence Buckingham Collection.


Gina: That was one of those special behind-the-scenes moments for us and so fun to share. And since you mentioned our Playing Favorites series, I have to ask: do you have a favorite object in the collection? Maybe something you’d like to display in your home, if you could? (Of course we’re not allowed to take things home. But if we could …)

Kirill: The statue of the young satyr with a mask is one that I wouldn’t mind having in the house. I don’t have the space for it, but I could sell a chair or something.


Ancient Roman

I’ve also always been fond of our Rothkos. They’d probably fit the mid-century aesthetic of our apartment, despite probably not fitting in our apartment.

Gina: Yeah, they’re not tiny.

So, you’ve been working in film and creative production for what, almost 20 years now?

Kirill: Yeah. 

Gina: What’s one piece of advice you would give to a person just starting out?

Kirill: I think it’s easy to get stuck on one particular vision of what you want to do. When I was young, I had a very specific idea of what type of film work I was interested in pursuing. I hadn’t considered how vast the possibilities really are for someone with my skill set. So my biggest piece of advice is to be curious and open-minded about what you might find interesting. Try things out, connect with new people, expose yourself to new ideas.

Gina: Yeah, I think that’s really important, both for work and just as a person.

Before we wrap things up, I want to say that you’re a really great colleague and friend, and I like working with you every day. 

Kirill: Thank you. I feel the same. 

Gina: Your positivity and enthusiasm have absolutely influenced how I work and how our teams work. 

Kirill: Thanks. The only reason my team and I can do everything that we do, really, is because you and yours do such a great job of finding ways for us to execute our sometimes very lofty ideas. So yeah, I definitely appreciate our working relationship. We have a lot of fun doing what we do. 

—Kirill Mazor, creative director, Digital Content, Experience Design, and Gina Giambalvo, digital studio director, Digital Production, Experience Design

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