Christopher Cook

Christopher Cook is the keynote speaker of the 2022 Fast Forward Digital Media Workshop at UNI.

Cook is a producer, writer, and editor whose work focuses on socially-relevant issues. His first feature documentary, We Are Superman (2013), discusses racial division and was broadcast over 5,900 times on PBS stations between 2017 and 2020, reaching 72% of the country. In 2014, he was part of a team that crowd-funded $60,000 for Broke, Busted, & Disgusted, a feature documentary about the student-debt crisis, which aired on CNBC. In 2015, working with Kansas City PBS, he created and directed Your Fellow Americans, a web series discussing race, immigration, and the American Dream. Then, in 2016, he was Series Producer over Re:Dream, an $850,000 nation-wide web documentary series.

In 2018, Cook was commissioned by the Johnson County Library to co-created Dividing Lines, a GPS-based driving tour of the history of segregation in Kansas City which is now the highest-rated tour on VoiceMap - a global audio tour platform. In 2019, he garnered his second regional Emmy for his motion graphics work on the 30-minute documentary Land of Opportunity. Then, in 2020 the Johnson County Library commissioned an updated, 360-video version of Dividing Lines.

In 2022, Cook completed post-production work on KINNICK, a feature-length historical documentary about 1939 Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick. Since receiving his B.A. in Electronic Media from the University of Northern Iowa in 2008, Cook has run his own LLC, Brainroot, where he produces both creative content and documentary media.