Organizing Commitee

Pedro Serrazina is an award-winning director, senior lecturer and animation researcher. His first short, “Tale about the cat and the moon”, premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival ‘96 and, part of the Portuguese National Cinema Plan, is still regularly screened in international retrospectives and festivals. His work has been exhibited and published internationally, ranging from film, site-specific installations, to music videos and academic projects. Serrazina is interested in the interconnections between architecture, public space, documentary and animation, and his practice-based PhD was dedicated to the use of animated space as a tool to reflect on social space. He is currently co-writing a book on Portuguese Animation for Taylor and Francis, is a member of the editorial board of the “Animation Practice, Process and Production” journal, publishes regularly, and was editor of the IJFMA journal special editions “Animated Space: engaged animation for the space(s) we live in” and “Truth of Matter: process and perception in expanded animation practice”. A member of the Society for Animation Studies and the Ecstatic Truth scientific board, Serrazina was the artistic director of the 45th edition of Cinanima Festival, and is currently working on his next film, a documentary feature entitled “What remains of us”.

Natalie Woolf is an artist/researcher/professor and innovator. Woolf originally trained in Fine Arts, then set up her own design practice for surface products, being commissioned for site-specific installations and exhibiting internationally with the Crafts Council UK and USA, several years at 100% Design UK and Italy, and having group and solo shows in the UK, Japan and Switzerland. Her PhD from the Royal College of Art (London) was recognised with a patent and exhibited at InnovationRCA and the British Inventors awards at the Barbican, London, leading her design practice for interior and exterior surfaces into animated and responsive technologies. She has carried out commissioned works and extensive studies for the implementation of arts’ practice in the public domain, for public and private consortiums. Working in this area reflects a strong interest in location, community and site specific interventions, and influenced her fine art practice with a sensitivity to natural and unnatural ecologies looking for ways to expand on and express our located histories and sensory experience through visual means. Woolf is a senior lecturer and integrated researcher at Lusófona University, in Lisbon, participating as a practitioner and author in publications and academic events. She is a co-curator for the Drawing programs at DELLI, Design Lusófona, and teaches various subjects exploring drawing in expanded fields and modes of research, within the Design and Animation BA and MA courses. She currently lives and works in Lisbon, where she is a permanent resident at Atelier Concorde.

Professor Birgitta Hosea is an artist and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts. She was previously Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art and prior to that at Central Saint Martins (where she completed her PhD). At both, she led audience engagement projects for organisations (including National Gallery, English National Opera, RSC, Old Operating Theatre Museum) in which animation was used to extend exhibition design and audiences. Her own expanded animation work has been exhibited internationally including ASIFAKEIL, Vienna; National Gallery X; Venice & Karachi Biennales; Oaxaca & Chengdu Museums of Contemporary Art; Hanmi Gallery, Seoul; Centre for Recent Drawing, London; Hunan Museum, China. Her accolades include collection in the Tate Britain and Centre d’Arte Contemporain, Paris, archives; an Adobe Impact Award; a MAMA Award for Holographic Arts; fellowship of the RSA; artist residencies in Azerbaijan, Ireland, Italy and Sweden. She has co-curated events and exhibitions for, amongst others, Adobe, Ars Electronica and Guizhou Provincial Museum, China: Fission (2022), featured 44 international digital artists reaching 250,000 people. Commencing with technical research for Adobe as software BETA tester, Birgitta’s funded research includes Sensory Spaces, developing tactile, VR sculpture software for StoryFutures (2020) and Future Transport 2030, animated visualisation of Synaptic Transport (EU R&I) with Bartlett School of Planning, UCL (2013). She is currently leading on feminist AI research with City University of London in which hand drawing is used with Generative Adversarial Networks to visualize statistics on domestic violence through animation. Her writing has featured in publications such as Animation Interdisciplinary; The Crafty Animator; Experimental and Expanded Animation;  Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital; Animating the Spirited; Animated Landscapes; and Expanded animation with her most recent book being Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020) co-written with Foá, Grisewood and McCall.

Dr. Tereza Stehlikova is a Czech/British artist and educator. Her practice spans moving image, participatory performance and is driven by cross-disciplinary collaboration. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London, where she researched tactile language of moving image. She has been a senior lecturer at University of Westminster for 15 years, as well as a research co-ordinator and PhD supervisor at the RCA. She is currently the head of visual arts department at Vysoká Škola Kreativní Komunikace, Prague and also teaches artistic research methods to PhD students at AMU (Academy of Performing Arts) and FAMU (Film Academy), Prague, and international MA students at UMPRUM (Academy of Art, Architecture and Design), Prague. Stehlikova is engaged in artistic research, focused on investigating the role our senses and embodiment play in conveying meaning through artistic practice. In particular, she is exploring how moving image can be used to communicate embodied experience and multi-sensory impressions. Stehlikova’s ongoing long-term artist film project, 4 Generations of Women has, amongst other things, been Shortlisted for BFI 61st London Film Festival Experimenta pitch, exhibited in a solo exhibition at Alchemy Film and Art Festival, in Hawick, 2019. Her other ongoing project, Disappearing Wormwood, has been premiered at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in January 2020. Other recent screenings include Stadtkino, Vienna, Austria, Anfilm international festival 2022, CZ, Efea 2022: experimental film festival, Norwich, UK. Her most recent solo exhibitions are Ophelia in Exile, at the Vitrinka Gallery, Czech Centre London, 2021-22, and Familial Traces, 2023 at Sternstudio Gallery, Vienna. Stehlikova’s latest project, The Infra-ordinary Lab, was selected for Prague Quadrennial Festival 2023. Stehlikova founded and now edits an online arts journal/platform Tangible Territory, featuring essays and articles by established artists/authors from the world of arts, science, philosophy, all centred around the role our senses play in creating meaning in art and life. Stehlikova regularly presents her research at international conferences and her films and performances have been shown at a variety of film and art festivals around the world. She is also a co-founder of Ecstatic Truth symposium. Website: https://cinestheticfeasts.com/