I see great parallels between artists and scientists. Both films and formulas are statements about how the universe operates.

Mark Levinson is the director and producer of the award-winning documentary feature Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider experiment outside of Geneva. Before embarking on a film career, Mark earned a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he first became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue, working on over 40 feature films including The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Seven, Johnny Mnemonic and The Social Network. He is the writer/producer/director of the narrative feature film Prisoner of Time, which examined the lives of former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most recently, he wrote/produced/directed the hybrid film, The Bit Player, about Claude Shannon, “The Father of Information Theory.” Mark won the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, the National Academies of Science Communication Award and the inaugural Robert E. Sievers Leonardo da Vinci Award for his work in the cross-disciplinary realms of art and science. His latest film, “The Universe in a Grain of Sand,” is a meditation on the way both scientists and artists make sense of the world by using their understanding of nature to develop new tools, techniques and processes to explore the deepest mysteries of the universe. His screenplay adaptation of Richard Powers’s award-winning novel, The Gold Bug Variations, won two Sloan Foundation grants and was selected for the Sundance Screenplay Lab, Film Independent’s Fast Track, and IFP’s Project Forum.<br />