Artist and Speaker Bios
Featured Artists and Collaborators
Donna Dodson is a current Resident Scholar at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center, a recent Fulbright U.S. Scholar at Q21/Museums Quartier in Vienna Austria with her host institution Tricky Women/Tricky Realities, the world's first and only animation festival for women artists, and a current member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Dodson is a graduate of Wellesley College and has won grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire Guild of Woodworkers and the George Sugarman Foundation. Her work is many public museum and private artcollections. Donna's work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Sculpture Magazine and The Daily Beast.
Trina Baker has shown her paintings, drawings and artist books nationally and internationally in galleries and corporate collections. Baker's animations have received numerous awards including a Pixie, which honors outstanding work in Motion Graphics, Visual Effects and Animation and two International CINDY (Cinema in Industry) awards. Her work tackles social justice issues such as domestic violence and sexual assault. Trina currently chairs the Animation Department at Lesley Art + Design.
Melchor Quick Hall, PhD, is a popular educator, writer and researcher. Dr. Hall is the author of " Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness" and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of "Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism." She is both a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC) and is a 2021-22 Rodman Rockefeller Centennial Fellow with the Institute of International Education. She received a 2011-12 U.S. Student Fulbright research grant to Honduras. Her poem, "Framing Reproductive (In)Justice: A Picture Perfect Gruesome Negress Hurt-story," was recently published in MoMA Magazine.
Eric Keller is a veteran CG artist with over 20 years of experience creating models for feature films, episodic TV, scientific visualization, planetarium shows, VR, AR, 3D printing and jewelry design. He creates training titles for The Gnomon Workshop and has also taught ZBrush and Maya classes at Gnomon School in Hollywood. He has written several top-rated books on both ZBrush and Maya, as well as numerous tutorials and articles for leading industry magazines such as 3D World. He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard Medical School. His credits include "10 Cloverfield Lane," "Star Trek: Beyond," "Aquaman," "Power Rangers," "Swamp Thing" and "John Wick 3: Parabellum."
Maya Rubio is an independent curator and editor at Boston Art Review. Her recent curatorial projects include "What’s the Secret?" at Gallery 263 and "M'Kenzy Cannon: Please Let Me In" at Boston Center for the Arts. Rubio has also worked on several exhibitions at Emerson College, where she studied the business of creative enterprises and art history.
Brandeis Student Scholar Partners
Cyrenity Augustin is a junior majoring in Creative Writing and English with a particular focus on both novel writing and screenwriting. Having been interested in stories since she was a child, her growing awareness of the world around her influenced her writing to not only inspire wonder but to show the intricacies of human nature and properly represent people of color in media. Whether cranking out an essay or developing a fictional world, she puts her heart into her work, all with the goal of making the world a better (and more exciting) place for everyone.
Pilar Duvivier is a junior at Brandeis and an MLK Fellow studying psychology and studio art. The majority of her artwork is made up of figurative works and self-portraiture. Using her preferred medium of paint, she draws inspiration from her passions for social justice, music, and art history to create personal narrative pieces. In the future, she wants to be a working artist and is also interested in exploring career paths in museum work (curation and restoration), art therapy and psychological research with a focus on mental illness.
Lesley University Interns
Sarah Clifford is an artist and writer chipping away at a bachelor of fine arts in animation at Lesley University in Cambridge. She is fond of mythology, legends, storytelling and her many pets. Her passion is character design, but storyboarding and other sequential storytelling are close seconds. Sarah decided to become an animator before she even entered middle school and has been single-mindedly chugging along toward this goal ever since. Beyond her interest in pretty pictures and cute critters, Sarah hopes to work as a storyboard artist and eventually become a showrunner or comic artist.
Paola Almonte Colon is an Animation Alumni of 2022. She started out doing stop motion animation as a basis. She learned 3D animation back in high school by using Blender and using the internet for resources. Her aim currently is to learn more on professional software like Maya and Z-Brush for 3D animation and modeling, as well as learning to code on the side. She aims to work in a studio one day. She is currently doing internships, gigs and personal projects.
Lexy Saunders, born in Los Angeles, California, is a senior illustration major studying at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Art has always been an important aspect of her life, starting with her grandmother. Being encouraged to try different mediums and forms of self-expression since childhood has shaped her artistic perspective and helped pave the road toward her art career. Lexy admires storytelling through art, especially in the form of animation. Animated films and shows are part of the inspirations that have led to her interest in working within the animation industry. The medium of animation is limitless — any story can be told.
Fulbright Scholars
Djounia Saint-Fleurant was born and raised in Cap-Haïtien, the second city of Haiti. She completed two bachelor's degrees in business and economics in her hometown at Université Notre Dame d'Haïti and Université d'État d'Haïti, and had the opportunity to study abroad at California State University San Marcos, thanks to the Global Ugrad Scholarship.
Djounia spent three years in sales and marketing positions in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Her dynamism led her to volunteer for the Finance Committee of the World Organization of the Scout Movement (Kuala Lumpur Office) for four years. She later served as the District Public Image Chair for the Rotaract 7020/ 2021-22 board where she used her digital marketing skills to promote the district activities and events. Additionally, she's been the chapter director of Startup Grind Cap-Haïtien whose mission is to inspire, educate and connect entrepreneurs.
Djounia was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 2022 and is currently a first-year MBA student at Brandeis International Business School with an interest in Finance and Data Analytics. She is the president of the International Women's Business Club and a board member of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Club.
Hoang Duong Thien (Thien Hoang) is a Fulbright Fellow 2021 from Vietnam. She is pursuing her master's degree in Sustainable International Development at Heller School, Brandeis University. Thien is interested in an intersectionality between environmental issues, such as clean energy, air pollution, biodiversity conservation and human rights. She earned her bachelor's degree in environmental sciences and worked to assess environmental impacts of development projects upon her graduation. However, soon realizing that community engagement is the core element for a sustainable development, Thien is becoming a community organizer to co-create meaningful public hearings with local communities in the Mekong Region.
Prior to Brandeis, she was working as community organizer at International Accountability Project, where she co-designed community-led development with local peoples in shaping the future they envision. Thien Hoang has strong passion in engaging community in decision-making negotiation, utilizing leverage mechanisms to empower vulnerable groups and promoting responsible business.
Aishah Winter was a litigation lawyer for close to a decade in Singapore with a focus on commercial disputes and cross-border family and personal law disputes, such as parental child abduction, custody and relocation disputes, etc. In 2020, Winter transitioned to social justice advocacy and nonprofit management as a program manager with a local nonprofit organization with a focus on advancing gender equality and women's empowerment.
Winter developed two programs, GenSafe (Gender Safe) Workplaces, to advocate within the private sector for workplace policies that are supportive of employees experiencing domestic violence, and UWS Boys Empowered, to provide boys with the skills and confidence in knowing how to safely interrupt and prevent violence in the community and cultivate future male leaders who can advocate for gender equality.
Winter's aim during her time with Heller is to learn how she can help underserved minority young women in bridging the confidence gap, caused by factors such as familial conflict or violence, poverty and racial discrimination, which can impact their self-esteem and self-empowerment.
On Feminist Animation | Panelists
Christine A. Banna is an internationally showing, multidisciplinary animator and educator. She works in both modern and traditional methods with a focus on experimental animation and projection design. Her animations and projections have been shown at the CICA Museum in South Korea and at various film festivals around the world. Some of her former credits and clients include composer Jennifer Bellor, the National Young Arts Foundation, pianist Christina Wright-Ivanova, Greater Boston Stage Company, MassOpera, Lowell Chamber Orchestra, and Keene State College.
Sarah E. Jenkins (she/they) is a queer Appalachian artist working primarily in experimental animation. Their recent work explores extraction, hidden labors and disappearance via in-studio and site-responsive stop motion animation and sound. Their work has been exhibited and screening at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Wheaton College, Torrance Art Museum, The Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany (LSVD), and GRRL HAUS Cinema (Boston/Berlin). Jenkins' residencies include MacDowell and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, and she will be an artist in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute for their 2023 Thematic Residency: Changing Climate. Their work is included in the book, "Queering Appalachia's Visual History: A Collection of Queer Appalachian Photographers," from the University of Kentucky Press, fall 2024.
Atia Newman (Quadri) is an award-winning international 3D animator with roots in Pakistan. She is one of the first women to ever work in the Pakistani animation industry. Hired as a 2D animator straight out of school, she made the shift into 3D animation when she discovered the added challenge of combining technology with the aesthetic value of animation art.
Shanti Thakur, Professor and Director of RIT’s School of Film and Animation, is an award-winning filmmaker, recognized for visually lush fiction and documentary films that span a landscape of subjects from science fiction to restorative justice. Her poetic eye explores the essence of humanity, and how we perceive each other through the lens of history, memory and identity.