INTERNATIONAL
Weina Zhao
Weina Zhao is an Austrian-Chinese director, writer and producer with a background in East-Asian studies. She co-founded Gewächshaus, an initiative to support BIPOCs in the German language film industry, and the Asian diaspora zine PERILLA.
© Photo by Eric Asamoah
Heta Jäälinoja
Heta Jäälinoja (b. 1989, Finland) is an independent animation director and illustrator. She studied animation in Turku Arts Academy and Estonian Academy of Arts. Her animated short films like Penelope and Nun or Never! have been widely screened and awarded in festivals around the world. Heta teaches and mentors animation students in Finland, Estonia, Sweden and Norway. Aside from film making, she is a printmaking enthusiast.
Rebecca Blöcher
Rebecca Blöcher is an animation filmmaker and visual artist whose works draw on the rich potential of animation techniques and materials. Notable for their artistic touch and exploring socially relevant topics, her films have been shown and awarded at international film festivals, in exhibitions and video installations. She lives in northern Germany.
UP & COMING
Maryam Mohajer
Maryam Mohajer is a British-Iranian, BAFTA Winning animator-director who was born in Tehran, Iran just before living through revolution, war and immigration. With a background in painting, she discovered animation after moving to UK in year 2000. She got her MA degree in animation from Royal college of art. Her short films have been screened at many International festivals. She lives and works as an animator, writer, director and part-time lecturer in London.
Gina Kamentsky
Gina Kamentsky is an experimental animator and sound artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her anxious and joyful short films “blast out at twenty-four frames per second, searing eyeballs and sending waves of buzz and crackle into the ether”. Over her three-decade career she has progressed through numerous forms and techniques, including painting, drawing and collaging on film, Rotoscope, Musique concrète, sound collage, stop motion, and pixilation.
İPEK HAMZAOĞLU
İpek Hamzaoğlu (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker and cultural worker as well as a freelance camerawoman and film editor. Her works focus on collective melancholy, future narratives, communal knowledge, and gossip and have recently been shown at Kunsthalle Bern (2023), the Mardin Biennial (2022), mumok kino (2022), Pera Museum (2021) and Belvedere21 (2021).
AUSTRIAN PANORAMA
Fariba Mosleh
Fariba Mosleh studied cultural anthropology, sinology and cultural management in Vienna, Guangzhou and Barcelona. Her work has taken her to New York, Taipei and Brussels, among other places. She specializes in transcultural collaborative practices between performative and visual arts with a focus on the realities of plural societies. She currently works as artistic co-director of the Brunnenpassage cultural space in Vienna.
© Photo by Karin Hackl
Jelena Oroz
Jelena Oroz (b. 1987) graduated from the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she now works as an assistant professor. Her latest film NO ROOM (2024) is currently being featured at festivals and recently won the ASIFA Croatia Award for Best Croatian Animated Film.
Marina Rauchenbacher
Marina Rauchenbacher is affiliated with the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the University of Vienna. She is a co-founder and a board member of the Austrian Society for Comics and a board member of aka | Arbeitskreis Kulturanalyse. Her research and teaching activities include visual culture, comics, gender and queer studies, and intersectionality.
© Photo by Michael Litschauer
VIRTUAL REALITY
Gabriella Chihan Stanley
Franziska Proksa
Franziska Proksa (n. Bruckner) is Head of the Media Creation Research Group at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences. She organizes the annual Animafest Scanner symposium and co-coordinates the Working Group on Animation of the German Society for Media Studies. Her research focuses on animation history and analysis, animation in AR/VR environments, and immersive storytelling. Currently, she is the head of two projects – VRinMotion (FWF PEEK) and AniVision (FWF-DFG Weave with the University of Tübingen) – and part of VaCoViCu (a FWF joint doctoral program with TU Vienna).
Eni Brandner
Eni Brandner is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist who lives and works in Vienna as a writer, director, animator and video designer. Her work is focused on exploring experimental connections between the disciplines of film, music and the performing arts, and the relationships between humans and new technologies.
© Photo by Teresa Marenzi