Alla Gadassik: Media Scholar and Animation Curator

Book Publication – “Interlaced: Animation & Textiles”

Celebrating the global launch of Interlaced: Animation and Textiles (2025), a lavishly illustrated print catalogue that documents and critically expands on the popular exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. This book explores the relationship between animation and textiles across over a century of media art, from early cinema experiments to contemporary algorithmically generated images. Curator Alla Gadassik’s deeply researched text is accompanied by captivating exhibition photographs, high-quality reproductions of all artworks and additional archival materials, and a Director’s foreword.

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International Thesis Review: Tokyo University of the Arts

It was an honour and delight to receive an invitation from the famed GEIDAI animation program at Tokyo University of the Arts, to serve as an international reviewer for their Masters thesis projects. This animation school is bursting with creative energy, storytelling sincerity, and — under the leadership of the brilliant Koji Yamamura — fully committed to artisanal animation.

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Sunday

Virtual Roundtable: Ethics of Accessibility

ECU-REB event poster with event title and photographs of three roundtable participants.

How can researchers and community-engaged artists centre accessibility and equitable participation of disabled participants, when selecting research or creative methods, designing their recruitment materials, or establishing consent processes? What responsibilities should researchers and creative practitioners have to disabled participants, whose experiences or stories they solicit or share? This virtual roundtable, presented by ECU’s Research Ethics Board (February 11, 2025), featured three participants speaking through lenses of crip theory, health design principles, and disability advocacy in the arts.

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Thursday

Animate Materials Workshop receives major research grant!

Sharing overdue news that I was awarded a major SSHRC Insight Grant (2024- 2029) to support the Animate Materials Workshop for the next 5 years. This funding will allow me to continue partnerships with brilliant artists, scholars, film festivals and art galleries interested in exploring material history and culture through animation. Emily Carr University published an announcement and profile of the project here. I have so many people to thank for supporting this work, when it was developed largely on my own time on top of full-time teaching. Two people I can’t thank by name are two external peer reviewers, who wrote thoughtful and generous reviews of the application. They understood the project and clearly helped the jury appreciate its potential.

Tuesday

Book Publication – “Graphite: Animated Traces”

My short monograph Graphite: Animated Traces (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2024) profiles the material and cultural history of graphite as a creative medium, with close attention to its important role in contemporary art and animation.⁠ The book highlights the medium’s temperament and significance by turning to the unfolding and provisional status of the drawn moving image, considering graphite as a medium of emergent thought, contemplation, tender intimacy and impermanence.⁠

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Exhibition: “Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” (Dec. 7, 2024 – Apr. 27, 2025)

The culmination of my curatorial residency at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to the reciprocal relationship between animation and textile art. Transforming the centre into a series of gallery and cinema spaces, Interlaced: Animation and Textiles brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile forms and materials alongside fibre works inspired by animation. Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries.

ARTISTS:
Faig Ahmed (Azerbaijan), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (UK), Jon Michael Corbett (Canada), Kelly Egan (Canada), Sione Faletau (Aotearoa, Tonga), Footprints Studio (UK), Sabrina Gschwandtner (USA), Marguerite Harris (France), Len Lye (Aotearoa), Aubrey Longley-Cook (USA), Jodie Mack (USA), Huw Messie (USA), Lindsay McIntyre (Canada), Miracle de Mille (France), Ng’endo Mukii (USA), Kate Nartker (USA), Ishu Patel (Canada), Pathé Studio (UK), Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (Canada), Harry Smith (USA), Caitlin Thompson (Canada), Vaimaila Urale (Aotearoa, Samoa), Jennifer West (USA), Jordan Wong (USA), Shaheer Zazai (Canada), Studio Zeitguised (Germany)

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“Threads and Fibres” Screening and Talk at OIAF 2024

Excited to return to the 2024 Ottawa International Animation Festival with another curated programme of animated shorts, Threads and Fibres. Following last year’s enthusiastic reception of the programme dedicated to animating ink, this year’s screening turns to animating fabric. I’m eager to bring together animation artists, critics, fans, textile enthusiasts, and secret knitters! The event will be introduced with a short talk and followed by audience discussion. Grateful to festival’s artistic director Chris Robinson for supporting this project. Tickets are available here, and details on the film lineup are included in the post below.

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Monday

Hiring Student RA – Indigenous Storytelling in Animation

[Update: the position has been filled] Animate Materials Workshop is hiring a research assistant for a project on Indigenous storytelling for animation. Supported by interviews with contemporary animation producers, this project explores the possibilities and barriers of adapting oral stories for animation, with a focus on contemporary Inuit animation.

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Monday

Public Talk: “Meshes of the Afternoon” + “Daisies”

This public talk (19-May-2024) introduces Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon and Věra Chytilová’s film Daisies at VIFF, as a continuation of their popular Pantheon series dedicated to the Sight & Sound list of “greatest films of all time.” What do these two films have in common, other than being directed by women? I look forward to offering some framing remarks and hearing from audience members during the post-screening discussion. Screening time and tickets are available here.

Friday

Alla Gadassik (PhD, Northwestern University) is a media scholar, curator, and lifelong cinephile. Her main area of expertise is animated media — covering a wide range of historical, geographic, and production contexts. She also researches and writes about histories of cinematography, film editing, and experimental cinema. Alla is an Associate Professor of Media History and Theory at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD), where she founded the Animate Materials Workshop. She lives and works in Vancouver on unceded lands of Coast Salish people: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).