Talent

Aalaa Mohamed is an artist and character designer from Northern California. She is a second generation Egyptian-American who grew up watching a lot of animation and reading fantasy books and comics, which inspired her to write and draw her own stories. While she was in high school, a storyboarding assignment and an art book she was gifted got her interested in pursuing a career in the animation industry. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in art and a certificate in design, after having taken as many animation-related classes as she could. She particularly enjoyed the student-run courses and helped teach a comics class for a year. After graduation, she took a couple of freelance illustration and design jobs while continuing to work on her personal projects. She is passionate about visual storytelling and loves to create new characters and come up with story ideas. 

Caeleigh Lightning is a Cree and Irish 2 Spirit artist and a member of Samson Cree Nation, completing her Master’s of Design at Concordia. She is a Research Assistant at the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Caeleigh is the lead artist and illustrator at Studio Ekosi, an indie game studio created by herself and her sister Keara, creating narrative games about Indigenous futures. Their first game Mîkiwâm was shown at imagineNATIVE’s iNDigital Space. Caeleigh designed a character in the Seven Generations Later workshop which was shown at imagineNATIVE 2021 with the iNdigital Youth Collective. She has created several animated stickers for Giphy, as well as illustrations for local youth program TRACKS’ children’s activity books. Having created fan characters for almost every cartoon she enjoyed as a kid, Caeleigh continues to love designing characters to live in the worlds she imagines. Much of her work comes from her experiences as a queer, displaced nehiyaw, exploring themes of sexuality, love, and interconnectedness. 

Chris Fequiere is an Animator, Illustrator and Author who has helped create series for DC Comics, Netflix and other global brands. Born and raised in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Chris loves animation, tacos and movie nights with his son Oliver and wife Dara. He currently teaches animation at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). 

I'm Dominick, and I'm a 3D artist/animator. I was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas. I have been involved in arts since I was kid, making comic books for classmates and entering art in competitions. I also played music in various bands until college. I graduated with a degree in psychology from Lamar University and worked in mental health, focusing on crisis intervention, and abnormal psychology. I'm super passionate about mental health, and the struggle many mentally ill people experience daily. After neglecting my artistic side for years and feeling the urge to create, I started 3D art. I never really thought I could start doing art again, until I was motivated after watching various "Smalls" on Adult Swim. I'm super inspired by wild cartoon characters and love animation, the ability to express myself artistically, and tell stories. 

Jerred grew up in Southern Oregon and studied Creative Writing in college. After graduating, he moved to New York where he worked as a camera operator for reality television, documentary, and independent film. 

A title sequence he created in his spare time was accepted at SXSW and opened the door to a freelance career as an animator and designer for studios such as Hornet, Showtime, The Third Floor, and Zealot. 

Keara Lightning is a Cree femme writer, game designer, and researcher. Keara designs digital interactive stories with her sister Caeleigh, under the name Studio Ekosi. Their goal as a team is to create moments of joy, characters that make people feel seen, and worlds that spark wonder. 
 

The demo of their first visual novel, Mîkiwâm, was exhibited in imagineNATIVE festival’s iNDigital Space, and in the online art exhibition Digital Mural. Studio Ekosi was a participant in the first cohort of Damage Labs, a start up program supporting studios led by marginalized game developers. 
 

Keara is currently an M.A. candidate at the University of Alberta. Her research analyzes environmental management on the Northwestern Plains, exploring how scientific constructions of the landscape have worked to obscure Indigenous ecologies. Her creative work grows out of her research interests to imagine the regeneration of Indigenous ecologies. 

Miriam Presas is a freelance concept artist and illustrator based in Pasadena, CA. Her time spent at ArtCenter College of Design prepared her with the skills to step into the animation and video game industry as a visual development artist. Now she is growing her passion for stories that explore in-depth world-building and unique visual approaches. 

Since He could hold a pencil, Tank has never put the pencil down. Drawing compulsively throughout his life , using art as a way to understand himself and his place in the world. Tank's interests has lead to the creations of multiple haunted house attractions, tiki mugs, tattoos, motorcycle tanks wood carvings, freakshow attractions, horror movie fx, countless record covers, gigposters, band merch, and most recently animation. 

Born and raised in Bulgaria, Tsvet came to Houston to study architecture at Rice University. A few years after graduating and working in the field, she transitioned into animation and 3D design. 

She has since contributed creature, character and environment design and modeling for clients such as NASA, National Geographic, Lego, and Showtime. 

Xin Li earned her MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2017. In the past few years, Xin has directed and produced award-winning fiction and documentary films. A short dramedy she produced about polyamorous relationships, THROUPLE, has been selected and presented by Short of the Week. She also co-produced a documentary series, FINDING HOME, about LGBTQ asylum seekers and immigrants. The series was recognized by the City of Los Angeles for contributing to the shared understanding of local communities. Xin is part of the inaugural cohort of the Ghetto Film School x Netflix Nonfiction Directing + Producing Fellowship. She’s a recipient of the Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera Fellowship for Emerging Media Artists, and a recipient of the Los Angeles Media Fund Fellowship that’s awarded yearly to a Project Involve Fellow. 

Xstine is an agitator, writer, director, and creative producer, and often creates with her 3 kids. A settler ally whose people have been arriving on Turtle Island since the 1700’s from Irish/Scottish/English and various European ports, Xstine is a multidisciplinary artist who creates masks, puppets, films and random acts of creativity. Xstine studied mask with many independent masters in Bali, Italy, France, and the West Coast of Canada, and trained as a theatre artist at Dell’Arte International in northern California. 

Yoo Lee is a writer/ director specializing in stop motion animation. As a Film Independent, Project Involve Animation Fellow, she received the Laika animation grant in 2021. 

After spending almost two decades as a fashion designer, she fell in love with stop motion animation and got into the USC MFA program majoring in animation. 
 

She has completed three narrative shorts so far and her short, A Poem by Alba has gotten into over 25 festivals.