Education & Outreach: Miwa Matreyek: Exploring Climate Change through Experimental Animation & Performance, Student Matinee

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and performer, currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where she is an university professor in performance design at Simon Fraser University. She has been an internationally touring independent artist since 2010. Coming from a background in animation by way of collage, Matreyek creates live staged performances in which she interacts with her animation as a shadow silhouette. Her work exists at the intersection of the cinematic and theatrical, the fantastical and tangible, the illusionistic and physical, often incorporating surreal and poetic narratives related to conflict between humanity, nature, and the climate crisis. Matreyek performs her interdisciplinary shadow performances all around the world, including animationfilm festivals, theatreperformance festivals, art and science museums, and tech conferences. She has appeared at events and venues such as TED, MoMA, SFMoMA, Lincoln Center, Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier section, the Future of Storytelling conference, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, ISEA, and many more. She has also shown her work with many university presenters, including Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, USC, Boston University, and University of Michigan. She received her MFA in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media from CalArts in 2007. She is also a co-founder and core-collaborator of the multimedia theatre company Cloud Eye Control. Matreyek is a recipient of the Sherwood Award (2016), the Creative Capital Award (2013), the Princess Grace Award (2007) and the Princess Grace Foundation’s Special Projects award (2009, 2012, 2019). Cloud Eye Control is a recipient of several awards and grants including MAP fund (2013), National Theater Project grant by NEFA (2013), NPN Creation Fund (2008). Matreyek’s recent work Infinitely Yours won the Golden Nica for Computer Animation at Ars Electronica 2020.