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Company History

Kikim Media was founded in 1996 by Kiki Kapany and Michael Schwarz, whose work over the past 20 years has been honored with some of the most prestigious awards in broadcasting. These include three national Emmy Awards, two George Foster Peabody Awards, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for Investigative Journalism, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, Red and Blue Ribbons from the American Film Festival, the Grand Prize in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Coverage of the Disadvantaged, and numerous Ciné Golden Eagles and local Emmys.

Kikim Media’s most recent productions for public television are The Mystery of Memory, a half-hour documentary highlighting the work of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and funded by Nobel Media, and The Botany of Desire, a two-hour documentary based on Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, which examines the co-evolutionary relationship between plants and people.

Other recent nationally broadcast prime-time PBS programs include My Father, My Brother and Me, a chronicle of Parkinson’s disease, for FRONTLINE (2009), and Hunting the Hidden Dimension, the story of fractal geometry, for NOVA (2008). Kikim also produced and directed Ending AIDS: The Search for a Vaccine (2005), widely praised as a compelling chronicle of one of the world's greatest biomedical research challenges, as well as the groundbreaking Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002), which was honored with a Special Jury Award from Ciné Golden Eagle and a Bronze World Medal from the International Film and Video Festival of New York. In addition, Kikim Media has produced and directed a series of short videos about social entrepreneurs for the Skoll Foundation, a series about diabetes for the University of California, San Francisco Diabetes Center and the Diabetic Youth Foundation, and the special features for HBO's DVD release of Deadwood.

Kikim’s first major project was In Search of Law and Order, a three-part series on effective ways of dealing with kids and violence, which aired nationally on PBS in April 1998 and on England’s Channel Four in February 1999. Kikim Media has also supplied PBS with several programs about the history of science, medicine and technology: Naked to the Bone (1997), an hour-long documentary about medical imaging technologies that have transformed the way we see inside the body; Stopwatch (1999), a documentary on Frederick Winslow Taylor and the legacy of his ideas about efficiency; and The Next Big Thing? (2001), which examines the ways in which society shapes technology based on Robert Pool's seminal book, Beyond Engineering.

In recent years, Kikim Media has applied its storytelling expertise to serve a growing roster of corporations and nonprofit organizations. In each case, Kikim works closely with clients to develop videos or DVDs that help them tell their own stories as effectively and economically as possible; our experience working with tight public television budgets enables us to deliver Emmy-award winning quality for a fraction of the price charged by most corporate video production houses.