Karol Martesko-Fenster is an Austrian-born American entrepreneur and media industry innovator with broad motion picture, digital, broadcast, publishing, and event backgrounds. He has produced over three dozen award-winning films and his career spans multiple decades including pioneering leadership in the American independent film sector.
Karol is CEO & Co-Chairman of global event cinema, and theatrical distribution, marketing and sales company - Abramorama, Founder/MD of Thought Engine, Innovation & Strategy Officer of non-profit Theorem Media, and frequent collaborator with Babka Film Bakery, Massive Change Network, and Sabotage Films.
Throughout his career, Karol has been at the forefront of paradigm shifting technologies. He is credited with the first global digital release of a feature film via iTunes prior to its traditional release (Big Easy Express), the pioneering episodic mobile distribution of a feature film (Sally Potter’s Rage), releasing nine Internet only prequels during the production of the documentary, The Bengali Detective, the first ticketed Facebook LIVE appointment viewing premiere of a feature film, The Outsider, and architecting a one day global theatrical screening in 12 languages and 355 venues with a Facebook/Meta LIVE interconnect between UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Auschwitz concentration camp in Birkenau, Poland for Roberta Grossman and Nancy Spielberg’s award-winning Who Will Write Our History.
Karol is a Producer on Benjamin and Jonathan Bergmann’s Noga Erez, MAU and Gelato, Thomas Wirthensohn’s Mystic Business/Sacrament and Homme Less (2014 DOC NYC Grand Jury Award Winner), Maura Axelrod’s Maurizio Cattelan – Be Right Back (Guggenheim Museum), and he is a special consultant on Kevin Kerslake’s As I Am: The Life and Times of DJ AM.
He is an Executive Producer on Susanne Rostock’s Following Harry, Jessie Deeter’s Hoof Dreams, Michele Mitchell’s OG* (*The Right Side of History, Wrong Side of the Law), Willa Kammerer’s Kelp Movement, Jonathan Gruber’s The Godfather of Sarin, Bill Muench’s The Artist and The Astronaut, Lila Schwarzenberg and Lukas Sturm’s My Father, The Prince, Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder’s The Outsider, Adam Schomer’s series The Road To Dharma – Riders of the Himalayas, Daniel McCabe’s This Is Congo, Leslie Iwerks’ Ella Brennan: Commanding The Table, Amy Benson’s Drawing The Tiger, Phil Cox’s The Love Hotel and The Bengali Detective (2013 Grierson Documentary Award, 2011 Sundance and Berlin Film Festival competition selection), Noel Dernesch & Moritz Springer’s Journey To Jah (2013 Zurich Film Festival Audience Award Winner), Havana Marking's Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers, and Danfung Dennis’ Hell And Back Again (2013 EMMY Best Documentary Award nominee, 2013 Grierson Documentary Award, 2011 Sundance World Documentary Grand Jury and Cinematography Award, and 2012 ACADEMY AWARD Best Documentary nominee).
Karol supervised all aspects of production and the multi-platform release of Emmett Malloy’s Big Easy Express (2013 GRAMMY Award and 2012 SXSW Audience Headliner Award), and collaborated with Leslie Iwerks on Citizen Hearst and with Harry Belafonte on the 2012 NAACP Image Award-winning and 2011 Sundance US Documentary competition film, Sing Your Song. Karol was a Producer on James Smith’s Floored (‘10), Jamie King and Peter Mann’s Dark Fibre (‘10), and Co-Executive Producer on Dean Budnick & Peter Shapiro’s Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub (’06), Executive Producer of Rob Nilsson’s Frank Dead Souls (’06), and a Producer of Gordon Eriksen & Heather Johnston’s Scenes From The New World (’94), Myth or Reality – The Von Trapp Family (’92), and he collaborated closely with Richard Linklater on his Sundance Film Festival opening night and Berlinale Silver Bear Award-winning Before Sunrise (’95).
Previously he was the President of Film for Michael Cohl’s S2BN Entertainment, EVP of Film & Animation at Babel Networks, and Head of Film at Chris Blackwell's Palm Pictures. While at Palm, he supervised the strategic re-organization of the media and film division and oversaw the company’s most successful theatrical releases, Scratch and Sex and Lucia. He led all operations and brand positioning for Palm Picture’s RES Media Group business unit, including its digital film festival RESFEST, the world’s original digital arts and entertainment festival, which in its final year (’06) was a global touring event spanning six continents, 19 countries and over 40 cities worldwide.
Prior to Palm, Karol served for three years as President/Publisher of Rising Tide Studios, where he supervised the growth and development of the Silicon Alley Reporter and Digital Coast Reporter magazines and numerous high-profile conferences on the Media, Finance and Technology Industries.
Karol co-founded and launched IndieWire, FILMMAKER Magazine, Condition One, RES Magazine, The Virtual Film Festival, and cinelan, and is a frequent speaker at media events around the globe with a particular concentration on transformative entrepreneurship and immersive video-centric cross platform content applications. He produced and managed multiple Webby Award-winning enterprises, including We The Economy - 20 Short Films You Can’t Afford To Miss (’15), Focus Forward - Short Films, Big Ideas (’13), Rage (’10), epitonic (’03), indiewire (’03 & ’01), and sputnik7 (’01).
In the early 1990s, Karol was the coordinating producer for Great Performances Music on PBS and produced over 25 music television programs and live satellite broadcasts, including; Gala of Stars, James Levine’s Mozart in Salzburg, Celebrating Gershwin: S’Wonderful & The Jazz Age, Herbert von Karajan’s Don Giovanni, Hal Prince’s Madama Butterfly, Pavarotti Returns to Naples and From Vienna: The New Year’s Celebration with Walter Cronkite.
Concurrent to his early broadcast work, Karol was the Market Director for the seminal 1989 Independent Feature Film Market, and in 1990 as Acting Executive Director of the The Gotham (aka IFP) , Karol restructured the nation's leading film service organization and co-initiated the inaugural Gotham Awards.
Current and former boards include Columbia University’s - Global Thought (CGT) and Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), The Wall Street Theater, Rightster, Bella Gaia, The Film Collaborative, Rising Tide Studios, and the Hamptons International, LA Independent Film Festival, Vermont Film & Folklore Festival, and Kitzbuehel Film Festival.
Born in Vienna, Austria, Karol has lived in over 20 cities internationally, and is culturally fluent in German and English. He received a B.A. from SUNY Purchase and an M.F.A. from Columbia University with a concentration in entertainment law, theater management and film production. When he’s not working, Karol enjoys spending time with his wife, Julia, and their three children Avalon, Kallen and Easton.