Matthew Libatique

Academy Award®-nominated Matthew Libatique has forged a unique career over the past decades. He began with the goal of becoming a music-video cinematographer because he was drawn to the potential of electronic image manipulation, but soon he was creating bold, innovative imagery for longer forms.

Libatique has a long-standing professional relationship with director Darren Aronofsky, for whom the cinematographer scored an early breakthrough with Pi, a disturbing portrait shot in black-and-white 16mm. Libatique pushed the film emulsion to its limits and beyond to portray an unstable, deteriorating mind obsessed with numbers. Pi won the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and Libatique was honored with an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his work; Libatique's feature-film career was off and running.

Libatique and Aronofsky worked together also on Noah, their sixth collaboration. Libatique was nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Award and an Academy Award® for Black Swan, also directed by Aronofsky. Black Swan was shot in Super 16, which is rare for an Oscar® nominee in the cinematography category. For his work on Black Swan, Libatique also received BAFTA, Critics Choice and the Independent Spirit Award nominations, to name a few.

Libatique's other collaborations with Aronofsky include Requiem for a Dream, for which Libatique won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography, as well as nominations from the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Online Film Critics Society. Libatique also served as director of photography on Aronofsky's The Fountain; they had first worked together on the short film Protozoa in 1993.

Libatique has collaborated with several directors, including Spike Lee, for whom he photographed Miracle at St. Anna, She Hate Me and Inside Man; Joel Schumacher, on Tigerland and Phone Booth; and Jon Favreau, on Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Cowboys & Aliens.

Other feature-film credits include Gothika, for Mathieu Kassovitz; Abandon, for Stephen Gaghan; Everything Is Illuminated, for Liev Schreiber; My Own Love Song, for Olivier Dahan; and Ruby Sparks, for directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
Libatique studied at the prestigious American Film Institute, where he earned an MFA in cinematography.

In 1995, Libatique began his career as a cinematographer in the music-video industry. His work has appeared on MTV for artists such as The Cure, Usher, Death in Vegas, Erykah Badu, Incubus, Tupac Shakur, Moby, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and The Fray.

Libatique earned a Music Video Production Association Award for Best Cinematography in 2002, for Matchbox Twenty's "Mad Season." Working on commercials and music-videos, he has combined forces with such talented directors as Stacy Wall, Floria Sigismondi, Dante Ariola, Brian Beletic, Phil Harder, Terry Richardson, Mark Pellington, Traktor, Kinka Usher, StyleWar and Noam Murro.

Universal Pictures