Zbigniew Bzymek was born in 1976 in Warsaw Poland and received his primary education in Lund, Sweden and Storrs, Connecticut. He graduated cum laude from Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine and received his MFA from The Polish National Film School in Łódź. To date, he has had a career full of diverse and artistically inquisitive accomplishments in the fields of film, VR/inter-media and art theatre.

In 2008, his film school diploma film Nagle na zawsze (Suddenly Forever) which was inspired by Kenzaburo Oe’s book A Personal Matter, won the grand prix du jury at Rencontres Internationale Henri Langlois and later went on to other international festivals, winning several prizes. Bzymek was called “un petit génie” in the French Press. Before  graduating from The Polish National Film School, he had already started working as a video artist for Krystian Lupa, creating video for seven international stagings, including Zartustra at the Athens Festival in 2004, Die Zauberflöte (2006) at Theatre an der Wien and The Seagull at The Alexandrinsky theatre (2007) in St. Petersburg.

Sought out for woking with video in opera, he was hired by The Wooster Group in New York, a company of artists, founded by Elizabeth LeCompte, Kate Valk, Willem Dafoe and others, who make work for theater, dance, media and whose associate artists include Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi and other influential U.S. actors. At The Wooster Group, Bzymek was tasked with making original interactive live on-stage video for the experimental baroque space opera La Didone which premiered in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse and was called a “wondrous production” by The New York Times.

In 2009, Bzymek received the Gregory Millard Fellowship in Film from The New York Foundation for The Arts and took a leave from The Wooster Group to make a film. With funds from the grant, Bzymek wrote and directed his debut feature film Utopians, starring Jim Fletcher and Courtney Webster, which premiered at the 61st Berlinale Forum, where it was nominated for the Teddy Award and was subsequently screened at CPH:Pix, Belfort, New Horizons in Wrocław and received distribution in Germany from Arsenal: Institut für Film und Videokunst and positive reviews in Der Freitag. He was featured in the New York La Génération “Do It Yourself” issue of Cahiers du Cinéma and called “a filmmaker to follow” in a review which appeared earlier in Cahiers du Cinéma.

Bzymek returned to The Wooster Group and after making on-stage video for several other Wooster shows, Bzymek became filmmaker-in-residence at the group, creating a documentary performance series called The Dailies, for which he made over 500 videos and which was featured and re-posted in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian and many other publications and defined the online media presence of the group from 2010 to 2018. With footage from The Dailies, Bzymek made a short documentary film about the group called Future Real Moments (2014), which screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York and at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro.

Soon, Bzymek started to perform with the group as well making short extemporaneous videos. He performed the nude role of Margarelon in The Wooster Group’s collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Troilus and Cressida in Stratford and London, UK. He was asked to dance in two shows choreographed by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel (The Show Must Go On at MOMA, 2012, and at The Joyce Theatre, 2016). Back at The Wooster Group, he created content for and originated the role of Man in Place of Kantor in A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) which played the main stages of The Skirball Center in New York, The Roy and Edna Disney Theatre (REDCAT) in Los Angeles and the Centre Pompidou in Paris between 2019 and 2020.

Concurrently, Bzymek was also the recipient or co-recipient of numerous grants including a MAP grant (with Mallory Catlett) and a Doris Duke grant that funded his video work at The Wooster Group. Bzymek also worked collaboratively in film with the playwright Young Jean Lee (which was also supported by Doris Duke), serving as cinematographer and editor on her hybrid documentary about White male privilege called Here Come The Girls, which debuted at Sundance in 2014 and was shown at Locarno and BAM cinefest, that same year. He also shot an experimental short with Lee which featured performances by Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) and Paul Lazar (Silence of the Lambs, Snowpiercer) and was written by Sheikhar Boodram, a teenager from The Bronx which was shown at BAM cinefest in 2015. Around this time, Bzymek shot, produced, directed and edited his no-budget film Xenophilia – which premiered at The Performing Garage in Soho and has since played at Jack Brooklyn, the Warsaw performance space Komuna Warszawa and Lubov Gallery in Manhattan.

Bzymek has directed music videos for Brodka and Mary Komasa and has been a longtime collaborator of Brodka on English language song lyrics, co-writing 5 songs on her Fryderyk Award-winning album Clashes and 7 songs on her album, Brut. He was nominated with Brodka for a Fryderyk award for Best Alternative Single for the song Horses in 2017 – the same year they won Alternative Album of the Year for Clashes. He was Art Director VFX for the music video Game Change (2021) which won Best Art Director at The Berlin Music Video Awards that same year.

As a founding member of the VR collective, Dream Adoption Society, with Krzysztof Garbaczewski, Bzymek worked as a writer, VR dramaturg and performer. He wrote the script for A Courageous Heart / a Kościuszko VR environment (with Dream Adoption Society) presented at Kościuszko’s burial mound, a post-apocalyptic art-as-revolution burial, commissioned by the Genius Loci festival in Kraków in 2017 and shown at the GoEast Festival in Wiesbaden and CSW/ Zamek Ujazdowski. He went on to develop (with Dream Adoption Society) The Artist is (all but) Present, an AR sound poetry instructional experience inspired by radical Polish queer sound poet, Miron Białoszewski as well as Ginsberg/Białoszewski a VR/theatre co-production between Nowy Teatr in Warsaw and The Performing Garage in New York – which describes the metaphysics of a seemingly uneventful meeting between Białoszewski and Ginsburg in 1965.

Recently, he has been directing theatre and devising performance pieces. His pieces have been consistently supported by The Polish Cultural Institute in New York as well as The Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at Baryshnikov Art Center in Manhattan.

Recent works synesthetically blend interactive video, music and sometimes VR into theatrical forms.

Xenophilia: Electro-kabaret (Jack Brooklyn, 2018) which is an interactive live re-mix of the layout of film frames from Bzymek’s underground film Xenophilia treading on the edges of narrative.

Pragmatists or Use Me (The Performing Garage 2018, Teatr Powszechny DAS, 2019), a piece made with Andy Maillet based on Witkiewicz’s dialog with William James with side by side noise, VR, and pop music(al).

The World Reads Kochanowski (Adam Mickiewicz Institute/NYU Skirball, 2019), a livestream reading of Polish renaissance poetry with actor Scott Shepherd transmitted to public spaces in Warsaw.

Amai: Maze Gate (Dixon Place, 2020) a piece combining video, cello and piano songs, based on Andy Maillet’s music, hermetic themes and a slight Glenn Gould obsession.

Ameryka[nie] (Teatr Studio, 2020) a visual-audiobook recorded with a full cast of actors from Teatrgaleria Studio with abstract animations for – video designs for a future show.

Koncert Pytajników / Concert of Question Marks (Teatr Studio, 2020) a socio-musical with Mary Komasa and Andy Maillet mixing audience demographic polling with solo song performance.

Interhuman / Interform, (2023 Baryshnikov Arts Center) a piece about the forces of Interhumanity made with performance artist Kuba Falk adapted from excerpts from Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary.

Deep Moon, Pluto… (2023 Grace Exhibition Space, West Hollywood Arts Festival, The LGBT Center in Manhattan) a video performance piece featuring Kuba Falk about superimposition and submission to gay male images as objects/ realities in the cosmos.

Bzymek has taught courses in pre-visualization (storyboarding, animatronics) at CUNY City Tech, participated in numerous artistic residencies and delivered an Art Talk at The New School for Social Research (2019) and a two-week long creativity workshop at the Polish Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw. He has written pieces for Bomb Magazine and Modern Painters as well as the foreword to the Polish edition of The Wooster Group Workbook. He is currently working on an experimental documentary film about rebellious lunatics inspired by Witold Gombrowicz for which he received a development grant from The Polish Institute of Film Arts (Polski Instytut Sztuki Filmowej).