Kudła was born on September 16, 1991, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents,
Anna and Tomasz, returned to Poland a year later. He holds dual citizenship, US and Polish.[1]
Kudła's paternal great-grandparents, Jadwiga and Stanisław Solecki, were posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on August 25, 2015. They risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jewish girl, Marlena Wagner, from extermination by the Nazis. In 2017 Mateusz Kudła started producing a documentary film about Marlena Madeleine Wagner-Alster, who came to Korczyna after over 70 years with her children and grandchildren to once again see the house where her life was saved.[2][3][4][5]
Kudła studied American studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.[6] Mateusz Kudła started working in the media at the age of 18. As he recalls, in order to take his final exams, he had to take a leave from Onet.pl, the largest Polish web portal and online news platform, where he was a picture editor of the home page at that time.
Kudła was awarded for his journalistic achievements by the Association of Journalists of the Republic of Poland in 2016. He was nominated for the Bolesław Prus Award in 2017.[7][8]
In 2015 he directed documentary film Wilczur about Jacek Wilczur, member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, explorer of the Project Riese undergrounds and the Home Army executioner in Holy Cross Mountains.