Joanna Priestley (born November 25, 1950[1]) is an American contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive[2] in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute,[3] Museum of Modern Art [4] and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan.[5] Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Priestley was born in Portland, Oregon to Mae Irene and Arthur James Priestley. She grew up in a wooded area near the Willamette River with horses, dogs, a cat and a huge collection of comic books.
Priestley began experimenting with animation early in her life. In an interview with Harvey Deneroff,[6] she explained: "One of the first toys I was given was a zoetrope, which worked on a little turntable and had little zoetrope strips with it. I loved it! I'm sure I became an animator because of that toy. Then I started drawing on the corners of my textbooks in grade school, and later studied art in high school and college, where I specializing in painting and printmaking."
Education
Priestley studied painting and animation at Rhode Island School of Design and received a BFA in Art (with a minor in Art History) from the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with honors.[7] During her final year there she produced thousands of posters used in protests against the Vietnam War and she was the Art Department representative to the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War.
Priestley received a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, where she received the Louis B. Mayer Award. For two years she was the teaching assistant for famed abstract animator Jules Engel. Priestley made the first computer-animated film at Cal Arts, Jade Leaf (1985), using the Cubicomp, early animation hardware that was purchased by Cal Arts in the fall of 1984. Priestley and Engel co-directed Times Square (1986), also using the Cubicomp[8] to generate images and recording them on a 16mm Bolex camera on a tripod, positioned in front of the monitor.
Joanna Priestley at an exhibition of her animation art (watercolor and ink on index cards) from Voices, Main Gallery, California Institute of the Arts in 1985
Career
In 1977, Priestley co-founded and co-directed (with Martha Kelley) Strictly Cinema in Bend, Oregon. They presented film festivals in Bend and weekly film screenings at Bend and Redmond High Schools. She became the regional coordinator, editor of The Animator and coordinator of the Northwest Film and Video Festival at the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum from 1978 to 1983. Gene Youngblood, one of the jurors of the Northwest Film and Video Festival, encouraged her to apply to Cal Arts, which she did in 1983. In 1988, Priestley founded ASIFA-Northwest with Marilyn Zornado. This ASIFA chapter included the northwest region of the United States which comprised Portland, Seattle, Vancouver B.C., and the areas in between. Priestley was president of ASIFA-NW for four years. The organization is now known as ASIFA-Portland.
In 1985 she founded her own company, Priestley Motion Pictures, where she has directed, produced and animated 31 short films,[9] the IOS app Clam Bake[10] (2014) and the award winning abstract feature film North of Blue[11],. Animated Women: Joanna Priestley,[12] a short documentary with three of Priestley's films, was broadcast on PBS and BBC2 in 1995–96.[13] Priestley has directed animation segments for Sesame Street ("“The Lumps: Rejection Victories” and “The Lumps: Social Skills”, 1990), and directed and animated music video sequences for Tears for Fears (“Sowing the Seeds of Love”, 1988) and Joni Mitchell (“Good Friends”, 1985) and a PBS series title: “Making Peace” (1996). After directing and producing short films from 1979 to 2015, Priestley made an abstract feature film, North of Blue, which premiered at the Annecy International Animation Festival[14] in France in June, 2018. North of Blue has won multiple awards, including Best Experimental Film at the Indie Film Awards (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Best Animated Film at the Yosemite International Film Festival (CA, USA),[15] Best Feature Film at the Los Angeles Animation Festival (CA, USA)[16] and Best Sound Design Award and Best Feature Original Score Award at the Local Sightings Film Festival, NW Film Forum (Seattle, WA, USA).[17]
Priestley has received fellowships from Creative Capital,[18] National Endowment for the Arts (USA),[19] American Film Institute (USA),[20] Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Millay Colony (USA), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Canada)[21] and the Caldera Arts Foundation (USA). She was awarded the 2007-08 Media Arts Fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council[22] and her films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY, USA), the Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles, CA, USA) and the Library of Congress (Washington DC, USA).
Priestley has been an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992 and the Short Films and Feature Animation Executive Committee (2018 to 2022). She has served on the board of the Regional Arts and Culture Council and been a member of the Public Art Committee in Portland, Oregon.
Joanna Lisa Quinn is an English independent film director and animator.
ASIFA-Hollywood, an American non-profit organization in Los Angeles, California, is a branch member of the International Animated Film Association. Its purpose is to promote the art of film animation in a variety of ways, including its own archive and an annual awards presentation, the Annie Awards. It is also known as the International Animated Film Society.
Patrick Smith is an installation artist, animator and filmmaker. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His formative years were spent as a storyboard artist for Walt Disney, and animation director for MTV's Daria and the Emmy-nominated Downtown. Smith spent five years in Singapore as a professor at the graduate film program for New York University Tisch School of the Arts, under artistic director/filmmaker Oliver Stone. Patrick is a fellow of the New York Foundation of the Arts and a curator for multiple international film and animation festivals. He lives and works in Montauk New York with his wife, Kaori Ishida and their daughter. The beginning of his animation career has been told by himself like this:
In 1994, I was in college, and one night decided to animate something strange. I didn't know how to draw, let alone animate, so I just did something abstract. A friend of mine told me I should put an logo on it and send it to MTV. So I mailed a VHS of it to "MTV Networks" the address I got from the phone book. About two weeks later I got a call from a guy named Abbey, who said that they wanted to buy it. I remember the day he called, because it was the same day that I got my rejection letter from Cal Arts. I re-animated the same thing, a bit tighter. The spot won a BDA award and a Jury Prize at the 1995 Holland Animation Festival. After I finished the ID, MTV offered me a job on Beavis and Butthead, which was my first ever studio job, and which brought me to New York City.
Rose Bond is a Canadian-born media artist, animator and professor who currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She has been considered a scholar on the subject of animation and an experienced animator herself. Bond's animations and short films have been shown at film festivals including the Sundance Film Festival. Bond is also known for her architectural animation installations. She shown work at Exeter Castle in 2010 and created a prototype animation for the Smithsonian. Bond's hand-painted films are held in the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
Kathy Smith is an Australian independent animator, painter, new media artist, and Professor with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Smith chaired the John C. Hench Division of Animation & Digital Arts from 2004 - 2009 & 2010 - 2014.
Paul Harrod is an American animation director, production designer, and art director with a special emphasis on stop motion.
The Street is a 1976 animated short film created by Caroline Leaf for the National Film Board of Canada.
Jason Donati is an animator, educator, and author noted for his animated independent film work, professional career as a 3D visualization artist, and academic authorship including Exploring Digital cinematography, published by Cengage Learning.
Candyjam is a 1988 7 minute 35mm short animated film animated collaboration by ten animators from four countries produced and directed by Joanna Priestley and Joan C. Gratz. The animation was made with clay painting, drawings, puppets and object animation.
Pro and Con is a 1993 9 minute 16mm short animated film produced, directed and animated by Joanna Priestley and Joan Gratz using drawings on paper, pixillated hands and object animation. The "Pro" section of the film was written by Barbara Carnegie and Joanna Priestley and narrated by Lt. Janice Inman. The "Con" section was written by Jeff Green and narrated by Allen Nause. The sound was designed and produced by Lance Limbocker and Chel White with music by Chel White. Pro and Con was commissioned through the Metropolitan Arts Commission's Percent for Art Program in Multnomah County, Oregon.
Grown Up is a 1993 7 minute 16mm short animated film by Joanna Priestley, using drawings on paper, pixellated hands and object animation. The film was written by Barbara Carnegie and Joanna Priestley, and directed, produced, and animated by Priestley.
Tom Sito is an American animator, animation historian and teacher. He is currently a Professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts in the Animation Division. In 1998, Sito was included by Animation Magazine in their list of the One Hundred Most Important People in Animation.
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña are Chilean stop-motion animators and filmmaker duo. They live and work in Santiago de Chile, and have been working together since 2007. Independent of each other, they make drawings, animations, installations as well as backdrops and they also write texts. Their work often finds direct or indirect inspiration in children's literature, using and resituating their narratives and visual aesthetics. In 2018, they premiered their first feature fiction film, The Wolf House.
Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis are a Canadian animation duo. On January 24, 2012, they received their second Oscar nomination, for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animated short film, Wild Life (2011). With their latest film, The Flying Sailor, they received several nominations and awards, including for the Best Canadian Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and on January 24, 2023, they received a nomination for the 95th Academy Awards under the category Best Animated Short Film.
The Rubber Stamp Film is a 1983 7 minute 16mm short animated film by Joanna Priestley, using rubber stamped images and drawings on paper. The film was directed, produced, and animated by Priestley with sound designed and produced by R. Dennis Wiancko.
The Dancing Bulrushes is a 1985 5-minute 16mm short animated film by Joanna Priestley, and Steven Subotnick using sand on top glass, directly under the camera.
North of Blue is a 2018 American animated feature film directed, produced and animated by Joanna Priestley with a score by Jamie Haggerty. It is an abstract, experimental film that was inspired by the winter landscapes of the far north.
Voices is a 1985 four-minute 16 mm short animated film directed produced and animated by Joanna Priestley with sound design and production by R. Dennis Wiancko. It was made with ink, watercolor, and pastel drawings/paintings on paper.
Missed Aches is a 2009 16mm short 2D animated film directed, produced and animated by Joanna Priestley. It was narrated by Taylor Mali and is based on his poem “The Impotence of Proofreading”, with sound design by Normand Roger and Pierre Yves Drapeau, music by Pierre Yves Drapeau with Denis Chartrand and Normand Roger, text animation by Brian Kinkley, character design and animation by Don Flores and storyboards by Dan Schaeffer.
Affairs of the Art is a 2021 British-Canadian traditional animation short film directed by Joanna Quinn and written by Les Mills. Quinn also co-stars as the voice of Beverly.
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