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 and was President for six years. This ASIFA chapter included the northwest region of the United States which comprised Portland, Seattle, Vancouver B.C., and the areas in between. 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 34 short films, [9] the IOS app Clam Bake (2014) and the award winning abstract feature film North of Blue [10] ,. Animated Women: Joanna Priestley, [11] a short documentary with three of Priestley's films, was broadcast on PBS and BBC2 in 1995–96. 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 [12] 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), [13] Best Feature Film at the Los Angeles Animation Festival (CA, USA) [14] and Best Sound Design Award and Best Feature Original Score Award at the Local Sightings Film Festival, NW Film Forum (Seattle, WA, USA). [15]
Joanna Priestley is featured as one of six interviewees in Martin Cooper's feature documentary History, Mystery & Odyssey: The Lives and Work of Six Portland Animators (2023). The other interviewees are Joan C. Gratz, Jim Blashfield, Chel White, Rose Bond and Zak Margolis. [16] The film premiered at the 2023 Ottawa International Animation Festival. [17]
Priestley has received fellowships from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts (USA), [18] American Film Institute (USA), [19] Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Millay Colony (USA), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Canada) [20] and the Caldera Arts Foundation (USA). She was awarded the 2007-08 Media Arts Fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council [21] 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's influences include Sarah Sze, Hilma af Klint, Mary Ellen Bute, Jane Aaron, David Hockney, Evelyn Lambart, Norman McLaren, Jules Engel, Len Lye and Antoni Gaudi. She has taught animation, portfolio design and cinema history at the Northwest Film Center/Portland Art Museum, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Universidad Iberoamericana (Puebla, Mexico), Santo Tomás Professional Institute (Santiago, Chile), Volda University College (Volda Norway) and the Art Institute of Portland as well as teaching animation workshops throughout the US and in Mexico, Canada, Germany and Norway. She is an active proponent of animation as an art form and has worked throughout her career to improve the status and exposure of animation in academia, museums, galleries and the media worldwide. Priestley has presented two papers at the Society for Animation Studies Conference, including "Creating a Healing Mythology: The Art of Faith Hubley" in 1992, which was published in the Spring 1994 issue of Animation Journal. [22]
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 2024). 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.
