Klára Trencsényi

Klára Trencsényi has been a Professor of Practice at CEU's Undergraduate Program since September 2020.

A film director and cinematographer committed to creative and social documentaries, Klara graduated from the Hungarian Film Academy in Budapest as Director of Photography. She directed several mid-length documentaries, among them Corvin Variations, 2011 and 3Weddings–Elena&Leo, 2009, and two award-winning films, Birds Way, 2009 and her first feature-length, Train to Adulthood, released in 2015. Her second feature film, The Missing Tale premiered in 2022 in North America, Asia and Europe. 

Her work has been screened at numerous international festivals including DokLeipzig, IDFA Amsterdam, Margaret Mead Festival New York, South East European Film Festival Los Angeles, Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Verzio Budapest, Guth Gafa Festival Ireland, CinéDoc Tbilisi, DocLisboa Portugal, Astra Festival Sibiu, Royal Anthropological Film Festival, Encounters Festival South-Africa and shown on television in Europe and Thailand. Klara has worked in many international productions as director of photography with Dutch, American and Hungarian directors and won several awards.

She has received grants from the Creative Media Program of the European Union, the Visegrad Fund and the Nipkow Fellowship Programme and took part in documentary development workshops at DocsBarcelona, CoPro TelAviv, Archidoc Project Development Workshop, LaFemis Paris, IDFA Summer School Amsterdam, Berlinale Talent Campus, A Sunday in the Country and the European Social Documentary Workshop (EsoDoc) in Italy.

Apart from teaching documentary writing, directing and film presentation techniques, she designed and taught Participatory Video courses at OLIve, Open Learning Initiative for Refugees at CEU (2017-2018), and currently teaches participatory filmmaking for teenagers and young adults in Vienna.

She is a co-founder of DunaDOCK Creative Documentary Development Forum.

Her research interests include the intersections of personal, collective and historical memory in documentary, archival practices, film essays and participatory filmmaking.