Mike Gioulakis
American cinematographer
Michael Gioulakis (born September 17, 1982) is an American cinematographer, best known for his work with directors David Robert Mitchell, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jordan Peele.
Early life
Gioulakis was born in Plantation, Florida, and grew up outside Fort Lauderdale. He started playing trumpet from a young age, as his mother and father both studied music at Boston University and Berklee College of Music, respectively. His father, Dinos, was born in Athens and grew up in Nikaia, Greece. During his senior year of high school, Gioulakis went to Interlochen Center for the Arts, an "arts and musical boarding school," focusing on trumpet performance and minoring in photography. He changed career paths after being inspired by the photography of Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Charlie White, and Erwin Olaf. He attended Florida State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Career
Early years and It Follows (2007–2014)
Shortly after his graduation from FSU, Gioulakis made a "no-budget" feature near Philadelphia with friends, then moved to New York where he shot short films, music videos, and worked as a gaffer on some feature films and commercials for companies like Samsung and IBM. After "several years" of work in New York, he moved to Los Angeles shortly before the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. He worked in lighting on television series and "stopped pursuing DP work", opting to use the experience to learn as many strategies and problem-solving methods as possible.
In 2010, Gioulakis was contacted to serve as cinematographer for Don Coscarelli's film John Dies at the End, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mike Gioulakis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.