Janusz Zygmunt Kamià Âski (; born June 27, 1959) is a Polish cinematographer and director. He is best known for his long-term collaboration with Steven Spielberg, being his regular cinematographer since 1993.
Among other accolades, Kamià Âski won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography twice, for Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). In 2019, the American Society of Cinematographers included both movies on the list of the best-photographed films of the 20th century.
Kamià Âski was born in ZiÃÂbice, the son of Jadwiga Celner and Marian Kamià Âski. In 1981, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 21 after Prime Minister Jaruzelski imposed martial law.
He attended Columbia College in Chicago from 1982 to 1987, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, taking up filmmaking as a profession before attending to the AFI Conservatory, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Kamià Âski began his career at B-movie mogul Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures. He worked under cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, first as a gaffer, and eventually as second unit director of photography. One of his early feature film credits as cinematographer was Cool as Ice (1991), a musical teen drama starring Vanilla Ice.
Kamià Âski was first discovered by Steven Spielberg in 1991. After seeing the television film Wildflower, Spielberg hired Kamià Âski to shoot Class of '61, a television film in which Spielberg served as producer.
He won twice the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in the 1990s, for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. He has been nominated five additional times for Amistad, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, War Horse, Lincoln, and West Side Story; all but one were directed by Spielberg. In 2010, he was awarded the Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal by the AFI Conservatory.
Kamià Âski became a member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in 1994, but resigned in 2006.
Aside from cinematography, Kamià Âski has also worked in the field of directing, first with the horror film Lost Souls (2000), and the NBC series The Event (2011) and WE TV series The Divide (2014).
In 2018, Kamià Âski worried that professional cinematographers were digitally losing control of their own images. In 2010, Kamià Âski abandoned the Chris Curling female fighter pilot World War II project The Night Witch, and in 2012, Kamià Âski discussed directing a Los Angeles-based version of the drama "XXXXXX" but nothing became of it.
Kamià Âski was married to actress Holly Hunter from 1995 until 2001.
In 2004, he married ABC reporter Rebecca Rankin; they divorced in 2010.
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