Petr Cikhart

Director of Photography

Petr Cikhart was born and raised in Prague. As a 19-year-old Assistant Director, he covered the war in Chechnya for Czech TV, and was arrested and held hostage for two days by Russian soldiers during the assignment. It was his first field shoot, and he was hooked.

He immigrated to the United States in 1995 after winning a journalism internship at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. After finishing his internship and working briefly as a Lobsterman in Maine, he moved to New York City to resume his career behind the camera.

For the last eight years, Petr has worked as a high-adventure Director of Photography. In this capacity he has traveled to more than 70 countries on all continents for a variety of programs, including CBS’s Emmy-winning series The Amazing Race, National Geographic’s critically acclaimed series Be the Creature, National Geographic’s Crisis Zone: Doctors Without Borders, A&E’s Dog The Bounty Hunter and Cowboy 101 for WETA, Science Investigators for WGBH or Throwdown with Bobby Flay, which is on the Food Network.

Petr has also lent his talents to several feature-length documentary films, such as Farmingville, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Showtime’s LA-gang documentary Gangs: Escaping the Life, and Blindsight, which was filmed on location in the Tibetan Himalayas and won the Audience Awards at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and the 2007 Palm Springs Film Festival.

Some of Petr’s current projects include the 12th season of The Amazing Race, the new Inspiring series The Big Give and feature-length comedy Best Man starring members of the Upright Citizens Brigade. He is also producing and shooting short narrative films such as You Can Get It If You Really Want and Broken Nose.

Between adventures abroad, Petr often shoots for Dateline (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, History Channel,The Daily Show (Comedy Central) and CNN.

As an owner of two Panasonic HD Varicam cameras, Petr has mastered filming in High Definition. He regularly employs alternative filming techniques, including aerial, underwater, and lipstick-camera cinematography. He speaks Czech, English, Italian, Spanish and Russian.