Nik Panic is a film director, producer and screenwriter working across cinema, documentary, music, theatre and audiovisual art. His career began in 1991, in the crews and post-production rooms of international productions by directors including Ridley Scott, Mike Figgis, Beeban Kidron, Michael Hoffman and Caroline Thompson. Those early years brought him into close proximity with a remarkable range of actors and filmmakers, and shaped an enduring interest in performance, atmosphere and the architecture of a story.

Since 2000, Panic has increasingly developed his own work as a director and producer, moving between film, music video, theatre and experimental audiovisual projects. His feature documentary And The Winner Isn’t (2017), an exploration of fame, awards and cultural mythology, was released theatrically in the United States; its title song was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2018. His work also includes the internationally staged theatre production Bette Davis on the Edge and collaborations with UNICEF, ATI and The CW Network.

Science fiction has long been one of Panic’s particular obsessions—not simply as a genre, but as a way of thinking about what may come next. For more than twenty years he has researched futurism, emerging technologies and possible futures, interests that now converge in his current television project, Diner 3.14, a science-fiction series.

He is equally drawn to the physical traces of the future that already exist around us: abandoned infrastructure, industrial landscapes and the uncompromising geometries of Brutalist architecture. Since 2022, this has been central to his collaboration with Istria-based artist Sz. Berlin. As the audiovisual duo Sz. Berlin ± Panic, they explore abandoned industrial sites in Istria and Rijeka, treating them less as ruins than as cinematic organisms—places in which past futures seem to remain strangely alive.

Their Trilogy of Decay (2024) re-animated three abandoned Croatian sites through film and sound. More recently, Illumination [BGD-25] and Transformation [SVT-25] emerged from a five-week residency inside Belgrade’s former electric power station as part of FASIH (Future Art Science Industrial Heritage). Built from the architecture’s own images, sounds and emissions, the films continue Panic’s interest in the unstable territory between cinema, industrial memory and imagined futures.

Across these different forms, his work tends to return to the same question: what remains, and what begins, when the future arrives and what if the future has already happened?