ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum’s Faculty Grants committee recently awarded $26,960 to the following eight individuals:

Sandra Andrade, University of North Carolina at Greensboro ($3300) for New Growth, an Afrofuturist animated short and animation education research project set in a Black salon in Neo New York.  

Shira Avni, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec ($1500) for Beyond the Mask: Animated Journeys of Autistic Women & Nonbinary Voices, an experimental, personal animated documentary highlighting the experiences of late-diagnosed women/nonbinary individuals on the autism spectrum.  

Soyeon Kim, California State University, Long Beach ($3000) for Woven: Our Mothers and Their Daughters, an animated experimental documentary exploring the emotional and generational relationships between Asian mothers and daughters shaped by migration, distance, language, and cultural displacement.  

Mihaela Mihailova, San Francisco State University ($3500) to support completion of the book manuscript, Delimited Animation: Generative AI in the Animation Industry.

Diana Reichenbach, Savannah College of Art and Design ($4740) for participation in TIME³, an international collaborative residency at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, culminating in the creation of a large-scale projection mapping work for the 170-meter façade of Karlsruhe Palace as part of the Schlosslichtspiele Festival.

Kyungwon Song, California College for the Arts ($5000) for Is There Anything Left to Fix? a 20–25-minute essay film that examines contemporary immigration systems, facial recognition technologies, and identification photography through hybrid documentary and animation practices.  

Jan Stebbins, School of Visual Arts, New York ($3000) for The Journey, a 15-minute animated film for children and family audiences about the harrowing refugee experiences for children and family audiences. 

Christine Veras, University of Texas at Dallas ($2920) for Émile Reynaud: His Work and Legacy, a creative research project culminating in a stop-motion animated short film examining the life, inventions, and historical impact of pioneering French animator and inventor Émile Reynaud.

     ASIFA-Hollywood is the world’s first and 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), animated film preservation, open source software support, special events, classes, screenings, and the annual Annie Awards™.

For more information about ASIFA-Hollywood, please visit www.asifa-hollywood.org.