Mike Godlewski is a filmmaker,
photographer, and designer at IDEO.
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Film

House of Glass (2021)

House of Glass is a personal dance film that explores the contrast between two states of being: the warmth and the cold, the familiar and the foreign, the natural and the artifice. Contained in it is a journey to rediscover oneself. I created my first dance film using two continuous takes that were shot nearly two years apart, stitching them together during the final editing.

Dance choreographed and performed by Alexandria Diaz De Fato.

Best Dance Film, San Francisco Arthouse Short Festival, 2023

Official Selection, FilmFest by Rogue Dancer, 2023

Most Daring Film, Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival, 2022

Best Professional Film, River City Dance Film Festival, 2022

Best Experimental Film, Exeter Dance International Film Festival, 2022

Official Selection, Sizzle Dance Film Festival, 2021

Richard (2022)

In 2000, my family had a falling out with my paternal grandfather. I grew up not knowing anything about him or his past. 14 years later, I contacted him to film an impromptu conversation in hopes of meeting the man he had become. I asked about his life. He spoke in terms of death.

Richard died in 2023. After his passing, I spoke more about our relationship and my reflections about the making of this project.

Official Selection, San Francisco Frozen Film Festival, 2023

Official Selection, Euroshorts, 2022

Critic's Choice, Royal Society of TV & Motion Picture, 2022

More Films

As a director, cinematographer, and editor, I make films that highlight the experiences of others. My work has profiled a wide variety of people ranging from scientists, artists, musicians, and a Japanese martial arts master. My collaborations with dancers focus on storytelling solely through movement while showcasing the beauty and grace of the human form.

Yeti Shorts

While working at Yeti, a small digital product studio, I made short films featuring a few of my colleagues. These videos were often used for marketing collateral like newsletters and blog posts as well as being sent to prospective clients to help secure new business. I sought to reveal the human faces and playful personalities of the real people bringing our digital products to life.

Photography

Street Photography

My candid street photography is fueled by a deep curiosity with the human condition. I aim to capture the unintentional beauty that people bring into the world.

Portraiture & More

Although naturalism is my preferred approach, I enjoy experimenting with other creative visual styles while preserving the true essence of the person I am photographing.

Design

With a focus on healthcare, my design work is driven by a desire to improve the quality of life for others by integrating a human-centered approach into everything I do. I believe that developing empathy and designing with intention are essential in making the world a more inclusive and accessible place for all.

Over the course of my career I've worked in roles ranging from interaction designer, digital product designer, product manager, and team lead. My values have remained a constant throughout: a dedication to designing with purpose, a duty to maintain the dignity of those being designed for, and a commitment to empower my teams to do their absolute best work.

I've partnered with clients across a variety of industries to help innovate their offerings and transform complex problems into meaningful solutions. Within the healthcare space, I’ve worked with organizations in the genomics, biotech, medical technology, home care, and pharmaceutical industries. Additionally, I've collaborated with educational institutions, nonprofits, human rights organizations, financial service providers, and emerging technologies.

Design Portfolio

While I’m unable to share my latest work, my 2017 design portfolio is accessible below.

Selected Clients

  • Abbott
  • Area 120 by Google
  • Bayer
  • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Bristol Myers Squibb
  • Clarity Pediatrics
  • ClearCare Home Care
  • Fabric Genomics
  • Farmlink
  • GE Healthcare
  • GeneDx
  • Genentech
  • Google
  • Medtronic
  • Meta
  • Orbia
  • The Commons Project
  • Together Senior Health

Experiential Design

Art of Listening

Art of Listening is an immersive music event series. Participants collectively listen to an album in its entirety and connect through a curated in-person experience. I discuss my motivation and goals for the project in an interview with Figma, which you can read here.

Capp Casa Art Gallery

I produce events at a pop-up art gallery and creative space in my own home where artists can show their work and connect with the local community. You can read about the founding story and my inspiration for starting Capp Casa in the About section.

About

I'm an independent filmmaker specializing on character-driven documentaries and dance films. I currently work as an interaction design lead at IDEO with a particular focus on healthcare. In my previous role as digital product designer, I led cross-functional teams at both boutique and full-service design studios to create products across a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, and emerging technologies.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

This popular adage (with its disputed attribution) has always guided the type of person I choose to be. I view the world through the lens of an experience designer – regardless of the context or medium. I unconsciously design experiences with everything I do: from the storytelling in my films, the effectiveness of my design work, or the feelings elicited at the art events I produce.

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When I was a child, I repurposed a simple program meant to teach the fundamentals of coding into a tool where I was (for the first time in my life) empowered to create immersive stories and interactive adventures inspired by some of my favorite pop culture icons of the time.

As a teenager, I learned the basic principles of visual and interaction design by teaching myself how to build videogame levels. This challenging yet rewarding journey equipped me with the foundational skills I would later use in both my professional and personal creative practices. Despite feeling confined in my small hometown, the worlds I brought to life provided the perfect outlet for me to escape and immerse myself within.

Having grown up in rural and suburban settings, moving to a major city was a brand new experience for me. I would often take aimless walks and felt compelled to explore every inch of the streets that were now my backyard. It was then that I purchased my first camera and began to capture what I saw, immediately observing my world through an entirely different lens.

In college, I built a toilet stall in a busy entryway to blur the boundary between public and private spaces. Sitting in my stall, I chatted with strangers and offered them Tootsie Rolls as a cheeky thank you. Midway through, promoters for an upcoming Andy Samberg event placed a poster on my door, unknowingly transforming it into the best free advertisement for the show.

One rainy night in Tokyo, I ducked for cover into a bar where I met and took a portrait of the enchanting bar owner Kuro, who told me stories about the Shinjuku Golden Gai Art Waves project she had founded in 1999. She described how within the nearby maze of narrow alleyways and bars artists would display their work, including her friend, frequent patron, and prolific photographer Daido Moriyama. Kuro's determination to just do things her way inspired me to create my very own pop-up art gallery and Capp Casa was born.

After producing a number of art shows with Capp Casa, I wanted to try something a bit more experiential. I founded Art of Listening as an immersive event series where people collectively listen to an album in its entirety and connect through a curated in-person experience.

While researching the history of Bar Kuro, I learned Daido had once covered every surface of it with his photos for Kuro's inaugural art waves event, and that this incident has since been memorialized in a number of surprising ways: from a perfect full-scale replica of the bar inside the Grand Palais in Paris, to a functioning pop-up bar in an upscale London department store, and featured in the stunning anime Tekkonkinkreet.

With the success of Capp Casa and Art of Listening, I was reflecting on the significance of my chance encounter with Kuro and decided to gift her a print of the portrait I had taken the night we met. She had the print framed in glass for protection, and placed it in the very last area of free space in the bar – directly above an iconic photo of a bloody shoe shot by Daido himself. Although Kuro has since passed away, the bar has reopened and is now run by her son who has kept the portrait of Kuro hanging in the exact same spot to this day.

My fascination with urban exploration, photography, and experience design all coalesced to form the story of Capp Casa. The history of it is forever entwined with the history of Bar Kuro and I'm thankful to have had the opportunity to meet the wonderful Kuro. Yet, the outcome of our encounter has yielded more than just a pop-up art gallery. Capp Casa grew into something much bigger – it became my home, or at least the closest version to it that I've ever known. Recognizing this, I've begun production on my first feature-length documentary in which I explore what it means for people from all over the world to build a home. Thank you, Kuro.