Since childhood, Lucia Zavarcikova’s guiding forces have been discipline and passion. As a young girl, she fell in love with tennis and demonstrated an extraordinary natural ability for the game. She began training seriously and won countless tournaments, both in her home country of Slovakia and in Europe. She dreamed of going pro and her ever-increasing wins suggested that her dream would likely come true. However, while competing at a prestigious tournament in Austria at the age of thirteen, the joy of tennis suddenly vanished and never returned.
Back in Slovakia, Zavarcikova drifted. Without the sense of purpose that tennis had provided, her teenage years blurred together. Upon graduating high school, she enrolled in a local university where she was assigned a short film project. At that time, the weather was very stormy and Zavarcikova had a vision of a figure walking through old town Bratislava in the pouring rain, wearing scuba gear. She threw herself into sourcing diving equipment and coaxing a student actor to appear in her project. She succeeded on both counts, although the actor complained throughout the shoot, pulling off his mask at regular intervals to ask how much longer she wanted to keep going. As he marched slowly, careful not to trip on his fins, Zavarcikova did not share his eagerness to go home and change into dry clothes. The passion that had disappeared when she quit tennis was back, now that a camera was in her hands.
With her drive restored, Zavarcikova applied to The Academy of Art in San Francisco as a cinematography student and was overjoyed when her acceptance letter arrived. However, her happiness was quickly replaced with a gut-wrenching predicament: she had no money to pay for tuition. Luckily, The Academy also had an athletics department and Zavarcikova was able to obtain a full-ride athletic scholarship, based on her former success in tennis. Fulfilling her duties to the tennis team as a full-time film student was hectic; she was constantly racing from tennis practices and tournaments to film sets. She began a habit of carrying ice packs to soothe her aching arms, doubly sore from wielding a tennis racquet and carrying cameras and heavy gear. Despite her grueling schedule, she managed to shoot fifteen short films as DP (Director of Photography) and work on over ninety sets, performing various roles within the camera and lighting departments.
Zavarcikova’s life once again became a blur, but unlike her teenage years, it was a blur of accomplishments and creative growth. Upon graduating, she once again relinquished tennis and devoted her entire life to filmmaking. She created a short film titled, “Esther,” which earned two nominations for Best Cinematography and six awards for Best Picture at international festivals. As a young talent to watch, Zavarcikova landed her first gig with a top-tier brand, the technology giant, Salesforce. The company was creating a feature-length documentary, “Story of Sales,” which was later screened nation-wide, and Zavarcikova came on as DP. Her work on this project cemented her arrival as a professional filmmaker, capable of big-time projects with leading industry players.
Despite the substantial wins of her post graduation years, Zavarcikova was hungry to continue learning and enrolled in the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles in 2018, to pursue an MFA in Cinematography. Upon completing the program, she once again received numerous awards, this time, for her thesis film “Apart, Together.” The project won Best Live Action Short at the 2021 GSA BAFTA Student Awards, Best Narrative Short at 44th AAIFF, Women in Film award at HollyShorts, a DGA award, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Following the success of “Apart, Together,” Zavarcikova created her first narrative feature “Only The Good Survive” with Sidney Flanigan (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always”) and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (“Reservation Dogs”) in leading roles. Since then, she has worked as a full-time cinematographer in Los Angeles and Slovakia for mega clients such as Amazon Music, Maison Kitsune, Viacom and even the world-famous children’s program, Sesame Street. She has developed a reputation for potent visual storytelling and for being able to expertly infuse subtext into her work. In demand wherever she goes, Zavacikova frequently travels the globe for assignments and particularly enjoys working in Slovakia, San Francisco and her current hometown of Los Angeles.
Between major brand assignments, she creates narrative and short film projects and also contributes her time to international cinematography institutes. In 2022, she represented Slovakia at the International Cinematography Summit, hosted by the ASC, as a delegate of the Association of Slovak Cinematographers. She is currently represented by APA agency.
Looking back, Zavarcikova feels a sense of gratitude and awe that tennis—her dream that did not work out—unexpectedly helped her realize her true calling of becoming an award-winning, internationally-acclaimed cinematographer.
