PROGRAM

Director Don Hertzfeldt is a two-time Academy Award nominee whose animated films include "It's Such a Beautiful Day", the "World of Tomorrow" series, "ME", "The Meaning of Life", "On Memory", "Billy's Balloon", and "Rejected". His work has played around the world, received hundreds of awards, and in 2014 made a special appearance on "The Simpsons".

Angela Wong is a UK-based animator and director whose work explores immigration, belonging, and the relationship between people and nature.

Anita So is a UK-based writer and project manager, working across independent, commercial, and public sector projects.

A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (2023), she develops work at the intersection of drawing and cinema, exploring themes of personal and collective memory, childhood spaces, and vanished places. Through drawing and movement, she seeks to bring to light erased memories, fragments of dreams, or moments of silence, in a form of animation that is both pictorial and sensory.
Her graduation film, Children of the Black Sea (2025), is inspired by her memories of a children’s sanatorium on the coast of the Black Sea, in Serhiivka, Ukraine. This place, now destroyed, becomes the setting for a dreamlike fable about childhood freedom, friendship, and loss. Mihaela is currently developing a new project centered on family ties and the rural world, continuing her exploration of transmission, memory, and collective imagination.

AJ Jefferies is a multi-disciplinary director, animator, illustrator and designer. He has been creating images, characters and animations for the advertising, gaming and entertainment industries professionally since 2001 and began to write, directs and animate his own independent films in 2019.

Jelena Milunovic is a Serbian animation filmmaker and illustrator, based in Berlin. She holds a Master’s degree in Animation Directing from Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam and another in Visual Communication from Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. She specializes in 2D animation, crafting poetic animated worlds inspired by her distinctive illustrative style.

By engaging the body, language, and space, I explore how closely one can approach another’s inner world, primarily through animation.

Edmunds Jansons, born in 1972 in Saldus, Latvia, is director, animator, book illustrator, and founder of the animation film studio Atom Art. He studied TV directing at Academy of Culture, graduated MA at Estonian Academy of Art - the masterclass by Priit Pärn in 2012, and right now is working on his creative PhD. Edmunds teaches animation directing at Academy of Arts of Latvia and as guest tutor at animation film school La Poudriere in France. He is also a film expert at Culture Endowment Fund and National Film Centre of Latvia.

Nik Arthur (he/him) is an experimental animator and filmmaker living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. Nik develops novel approaches that engage with nature's intrinsic patterns, shaping new methods of storytelling.
Working across film, advertising, and music, Nik has collaborated with an array of brands and artists such as YouTube, SZA, Cosmos, Dominic Fike, Psycho Films, XL Recordings, Acne Studios, and more. Nik has been recognized at Slamdance Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and supported by the Canadian Council for the Arts.

We are the Cheap Motion Pictures, a team of engineer and scientists making animation.

Georges Sifianos, filmmaker, visual artist, and philosopher, founded ENSAD’s Animation Department in 1995. He authored Esthétique du cinéma d’animation (McLaren-Lambart Prize, Hemingway Grant) and directed acclaimed films, including The Blind Writer. In 2025, he received the Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies at Animafest Zagreb.