ASIFA-Hollywood Announces its Animation Educator’s Forum 2020 Faculty Grant recipients

ASIFA-Hollywood Announces its Animation Educator’s Forum 2020 Faculty Grant recipients

April 28th, 2020

Jerry Beck

ASIFA-Hollywood announced today its Animation Educator’s Forum (AEF) fourth annual Faculty Grant recipients: Zoya Baker (New York University), Mindy Johnson (CalArts), Nazil Eda Noyan (Bahcesehir University, Istanbul/Turkey), Jack Parry (Deakin University, Australia) and Kevin Sandler (Arizona State University).

The AEF faculty grants are designed to provide support for individuals or groups with expenditures associated with research, scholarly activity or creative projects in the field of animation and is open to both full- and part-time teachers at accredited post-secondary institutions world-wide.

“A great number of high-quality proposals were submitted this year,” said Raquel Rabbit, associate professor of the design, animation & illustration program at San Jose State University. “The applicants covered a variety of original animated projects, including short films, VR/AR and interactive projects, scholarly efforts and conference or research travel requests. It was quite a task to choose a few because many of them were truly excellent proposals.”

Applicants for this year’s grants were received from educators in Australia, Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Below is a brief description of each grant recipient and their winning projects:

Zoya Baker, to help fund Memory Herbarium, an interactive animation installation which celebrates the relationships between people and plants through Augmented Reality, storytelling, and co-created animation;

Mindy Johnson, to conduct in-depth research which formally documents the lives and accomplishments of key pioneering women who developed and expanded the earliest techniques, artistry and production methodologies within animation;

Nazil Eda Noyan, providing funds towards the making of “A Tender Dream,” a short musical Animated Film inspired by Mihiri Müşfik, the extraordinary first woman painter in Turkey;

Jack Parry, to help finance phenomenological research into the creative animation experience of “shared reality”;

Kevin Sandler, to assist in completion of Scooby-Doo: The Art and Business of an Animated Icon (Duke University Press), debating the nature of children’s entertainment, free-market regulation vs. governmental censorship, dwindling network viewership and the effects of media conglomeration upon diversity, quality, and consumerism.

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Jerry Beck

Writer, cartoon producer and author of more than 15 books on animation history. A former studio exec with Nickelodeon and Disney; currently on the faculty at both CalArts in Valencia and Woodbury University in Burbank, California.