Artists Spotlight: Joanna Priestley
Joanna Priestley, animator & filmmaker
Recipient of 2007 RACC Media Arts Fellowship; Recipient RACC Project Grants 2004, 2006; Percent for Art from Multnomah County Commission, 1992.
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| Joanna Priestley's Street Car Named Perspire, 2007 |
Joanna Priestley is a world-class animator and filmmaker with a career that spans over 25 years. The main goals of her work are to explore and develop personal cinema in animation, as well as extend the boundaries and definition of her art form. AEarlier this summer Joanna was awarded the distinguished RACC Media Arts Fellowship Award for her prolific output which has humor, depth, and appeal, and for being an inspiration to audiences and fellow animators around the world.
Festival Retrospectives of her work have shown on PBS and BBC2, as well as in Norway, Germany, Poland, and India. Her work has won awards at many film festivals, including First Prize at the Big Muddy Film Festival for Dew Line (2005) and the Golden Gate Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival for Utopia Garden (1997). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Creative Capital Foundation. In addition, she has a stellar track record of serving the community through mentorships and collaborations. Joanna has run an apprentice program since 1986, and she teaches animation workshops worldwide. For years she has served as an ambassador for Northwest filmmaking, and was an early supporter of the Platform International Animation Festival that debuted in Portland in June, 2007.
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| Priestley's Extended Play, an installation created for the Platform Animation Festival, June 07. |
With the RACC Fellowship, Joanna will take a year off from mentoring, teaching, traveling, fundraising, volunteering, curating, and presenting programs. She will establish an organic plan to invigorate her filmmaking process and develop a new direction in her work. Joanna plans to work on a new drawing style and experiment with combining 2-D computer drawings with real, 3-D background sets. She will also take some time to develop her own personal brand of comedy. Joanna was honored at a luncheon hosted by RACC in September, 2007.
Priestley's work can be seen, through November 11, 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Craft's Form Animated. Guest curated by Rose Bond, this series explores the relationship between vessels and forms through animation. Breaking the boundaries between 2 and 3 dimensional space, the series raises questions about how animation can be viewed as craft, and also as a means of understanding craft in contemporary culture. Priestley's Utopia Garden has been selected for this exhibit. Previous RACC Media Arts Fellowship winner in 2001, Jim Blashfield, will also be particiapting in this exhbit.
On February 16, 2008 Priestley's Streetcar Named Perspire will screen at the 31st Portland International Film Festival presented by the NW Film Center. Priestley will be one of the visiting filmmakers and discuss her work.
Contact Information:
website: www.primopix.com
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RACC Staff to Contact
Mary Bauer
Communications Associate
503.823.5426
mbauer@racc.org
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