Born in New York City, Faith Hubley began her career in the theater
before moving to Hollywood to become a film editor and script
supervisor. She can recall at age nineteen cutting Shostakovich music
into Republic Westerns. Eventually she returned to New York to work on
such live-action films as Twelve Angry Men.
She and her late husband, John Hubley, established their independent animation
studio in 1955. More than twenty films resulted from this remarkable
partnership. For two decades the Hubleys co-created animation that transformed
the art, winning scores of prizes, including three Academy Awards.
As a solo artist, Hubley has designed, directed, and produced eighteen more
animated films inspired by myth, art, and nature, which have received honors at
the Venice, Cannes, and Annecy film festivals, as well as 14 CINE Golden
Eagles. She has been honored with retrospectives in Los Angeles, at New York's
Public Theater, and at film festivals in Venice and Hiroshima; and she will
soon be feted, along with her daughter Emily, at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. She teaches animation at Yale, continues to exhibit her paintings,
and plays the cello.
Her 1982 film Enter Life is on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian's
Museum of Natural History. As film historian Leonard Maltin has written of her
work, "Faith Hubley's integrity, humanity, and artistry shine in everything she
does."
Joanna Priestley is a native Oregonian who studied painting and
printmaking in college and lived in Paris before moving back to her
home state as an independent artist and painter. Priestley discovered
animation while running an cinematheque in a small cow town in rural
Oregon, showing classic films at the local high school. The first
in-person guest filmmaker was an Oscar-winning animator, and
Priestley, at first intrigued, became hooked.
She studied animation at the prestigious Cal Arts program in Southern
California and returned to the Portland area to begin her work as an
award-winning film director and producer. Her films have received honors at
more than eighty festivals, including the National Educational Film Festival,
National Independent Film and Video Festival, Canadian International Animation
Festival, and San Francisco International Film Festival. Retrospectives of her
work have been shown in recent years at the Museum of Modern Art, the Center
for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, and the High Museum in Atlanta.
England's Channel Four plans to broadcast a retrospective of her animation art
in mid-1995.
Grown Up recently won First Prize at the Northwest Film and Video
Festival. Since then, she's completed a film, Pro and Con, in
collaboration with her studio next-door neighbor, the Academy Award-winning
animator Joan Gratz. She also hopes at some point in her career to make a
full-length live-action feature.
Born in Sydney, Australia, Ruth Peyser works as an animator, graphic designer, and illustrator in New York City, where she has lived for fifteen years. Her animated films have been shown at the International Animation Festival at Annecy, France, and as part of WNET's Independent Focus series. Titles include Another Great Day, which won awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, ASIFA East Short Film Festival, and the Cinema Guild Film Festival; Random Positions, which won an award at the Sinking Creek Film Celebration; and One Nation Under TV.
Peyser also played guitar in New York's downtown music scene, but after the
birth of her second child, she decided something had to give. She now devotes
most of her energies to her children and her artwork.
Lynn Smith was born in New York, but started life as an independent animation filmmaker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968. She moved to Montreal, where she now lives, in 1975. She has carved out a specialty in children's filmmaking. Her past credits include the children's classic The Shout It Out Alphabet Film, which won awards at the Chicago International
Film Festival, the American Film Festival, and the National Educational Film
Festival.
Her films Teacher, Lester Bit Me! and This Is Your Museum
Speaking both won first prize in the Instructional category at Ottawa's
International Animation Festival, and the latter took two top citations at the
Annecy International Film Festival. Her anti-smoking public service message
Happy Birthday won first prize in the Information Film category at
Annecy. Her film Pearl's Diner received numerous international awards,
including the 1993 Genie Award for Best Animated Short from the Academy of
Canadian Cinema and Television. Smith teaches animation at Concordia University
in Montreal.
Sybil DelGaudio's interest in animation extends beyond her career as a
filmmaker. An associate professor in the Communication Arts Department
at New York's Hofstra University, she teaches film studies and
production. In addition, she has written many articles for film
journals and anthologies, among them Jump Cut, Columbia
Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, and The American Animated
Cartoon.
Her recent book, Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich and
Costume was published by Associated University Presses. Dr. DelGaudio is
also a member of the Society for Animation Studies. She recently presented a
series on independent film and filmmakers at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
In addition to her work as an independent filmmaker, Patty Wineapple
is a vice-president at Grey Advertising in New York. She has produced
more than 400 television commercials, receiving numerous awards for
her work on campaigns for such clients as the Borden Company, Parker
Brothers and Stride-Rite. In 1977 she produced the one-hour
television special Broadway, My Street!, co-starring Jerry
Ohrbach and Florence Henderson. And in 1980 she co-produced
SPFX-1140, a short film directed by Bob Balaban.
Television producer Kate Lehmann conceived and commissioned Side-Kicks
Productions to develop and produce ANIMATED WOMEN for the Independent Television Service (ITVS), She worked in production management for nine years at KTCA-Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was managing director for film and photography exhibition at Film in the Cities.
During her three-year tenure at ITVS, she oversaw the development and production of several innovative projects, including the limited series DECLARATIONS: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN IDEALS and TV FAMILIES. Recently, Lehmann formed her own company to develop projects and act as an independent consultant.
Joanna Priestley (POINT OF VIEW)
Sybil DelGaudio
(Series Director/Side-Kicks Productions)
Patty Wineapple
(Series Producer/Side-Kicks Productions)
Kate Lehmann
(Coordinating Producer for ITVS)
ANIMATED WOMEN Index