About me:

Nina Paley's career began in 1988 with her self-syndicated comic strip, Nina's Adventures, which appeared in several alternative newspapers and two paperback collections, Depression is Fun and Nina's Adventures. She created two solo comic books for Dark Horse Comics, and various graphic short stories for Last Gasp Comix, Rip Off Press, Laugh Lines Press, Grateful Dead Comix, Kitchen Sink Press, and the Japanese artist volume Jarebong. Her first mainstream daily comic strip, Fluff, was distributed internationally by Universal Press Syndicate between 1995 and 1998; in 2002 she drew The Hots for King Features Syndicate. Comics burn-out drove Nina to animation. Her first film, Luv Is...(1998), was clay stop-motion shot with a vintage super-8 camera. She went on to make 3 more films in 1998, each exploring a different medium: Cancer (drawing and scratching on 35mm), I Heart My Cat (16mm stop-motion) and Follow Your Bliss (traditional pencil and ink on paper). In 1999 she made the world's first completely cameraless IMAX film, Pandorama, and received a grant from the Film Arts Foundation to produce Fetch! (2001), a short film incorporating optical illusions. In 2002 she created a controversial series about overpopulation and the environment, including the Stork, which won first prize at the EarthVision Environmental Film Festival and an unsolicited invitation to Sundance (2003). In 2002 she briefly lived in Trivandrum, India, where she encountered the Ramayana, sexism, and the failure of her marriage. She subsequently embarked on her current project, "Sita Sings the Blues," a feature-in-progress combining the ancient Indian epic Ramayana with 1920's American jazz. In addition to making independent animated festival films, Nina freelances and teaches animation at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. She is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.