ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum (AEF) is proud to announce the ten recipients of this year’s AEF Faculty Grants program. The Faculty Grants Committee of the Animation Educators Forum awarded a total of $30,000 to the recipients. Applications came from seven states, six countries, and four continents from a variety of animation artists, educators, and scholars.
AEF Faculty Grants are designed to provide support for individuals or groups with reasonable expenditures associated with research, scholarly activity or creative projects in the field of animation. Grants are open to both full- and part-time faculty at accredited post-secondary institutions.
“The committee was impressed by the array of applications dealing with the pressing issues of our day like artificial intelligence, immigration, and the environment,” said Kevin Sandler, Faculty Grants chair and co-chair of AEF. “Filmmakers, podcasters, festival directors, web designers, teachers, and scholars submitted imaginative and thought-provoking proposals that spoke to the depth and breadth of animation in all walks of public life.”
The recipients of this year’s AEF Faculty Grants are:
• Meghdad Asadilari, Rochester Institute of Technology – $5000 for Living Afar, a 3D animated short film that reimagines Persian heritage and the immigrant experience through the symbolic narrative of a handwoven carpet.
• Monireh Astani and Benjamin Rimmer, University of Staffordshire – $1365 for a project that investigates the pedagogical impact of introducing real-time animation pipelines to undergraduate animation students.
• Andy Buchanan, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology – $2592 to support the development of a digital infrastructure for collaboration and a bi-monthly mini-symposium series on AI issues for animation educators.
• James Calvert and Ari Chand, University of South Australia – $4800 for Run Koala Run, an animated short film that explores what happens when a traditionally animated cartoon character comes up against generative AI.
• Tom Eaton, Kingsborough Community College – $1000 to fund rental space for the college’s annual Rarebit Animation Festival.
• Ana Estarita, University of Pennsylvania – $4840 for Home-Place, an interactive animated installation that explores immigration through the lens of our relationship to the landscape.
• Tabitha Fisher, Sheridan College – $1000 for Most Fun Podcast, an interview-based radio show that uncovers the surprising ways that animation artists stay creatively motivated by “finding the fun” in their work and life.
• Annapurna Kumar, CalArts/UCLA – $2133 for The Pioneer Woman, an animated story of Appalachian quilts, natural gas, and an estranged family.
• Mary Martins, University of Greenwich – $2270 for House of this World, an animated documentary that explores the history of the enslaved Africans taken from Nigeria to Brazil through two carnival groups, one in Lagos and one in Salvador.
• Ji Yoon “Guava” Rhee, University of Pennsylvania – $5000 for Signs of Life, a 3D animated film for digital dome projection that explores speculative atmospheres and environmental conditions on Exoplanet K2-18b.
ASIFA-Hollywood is the world’s foremost professional organization dedicated to promoting the Art of Animation and celebrating the people who create it. Today, ASIFA-Hollywood, the largest chapter of the international organization ASIFA, supports a wide range of animation activities and preservation efforts through its membership. Current initiatives include the Animation Archive, Animation Aid Foundation, Animation Educators’ Forum (AEF), film preservation, open-source support, special events, screenings and the annual Annie Awards.
For more information on ASIFA-Hollywood, please visit https://asifa-hollywood.org.
