In December 2007 Adam was awarded American Photo of The Year from American Photo magazine for his unique miniature photography work with bees. He constructs each photograph as a diorama, sculpting each element by hand and photographing the set. Makarenko uses these constructed realities to tell a story, otherwise impossible through conventional photography. Makarenko has garnered incredible notoriety as a photographer, including having won the coveted Bright Spark Award, published in The Magenta Foundations Flash Forward 2008 annual publication. _______________________
During 2008, Adam also co-created a stop motion music video with Alan Poon, entitled In Our Talons by the Bowerbirds, which was voted as one of the top 20 video’s in 2008 by SPIN magazine. _______________________
In 2009 Adam directed a stop motion/live action integrated music video for the band Zeus for a song called Marching Through Your Head. He spent over one month on the Zeus video, working over sixteen hours a day crafting and constructing the sets and directing the animators. Zeus’s Marching Through Your Head was a feature short at the World Wide Short Film Festival in 2010. The video has also been featured as a staff pick on Vimeo. ______________________
Recently, Adam has completed two more music videos: One for Zeus called How Does it Feel, and one for Broken Social Scene called Forced to Love. Forced to love was voted #3 on the 2k10 in Review: The Most Technologically Innovative Videos of 2010. It has also been nominated for Juno Award in 2011. ______________________
Adam graduated from film school Confederation College in Thunder Bay, Ontario in 2003, and has been pursuing film/photography ever since moving to Toronto, in the same year.