Joanna Priestley

Early life and education

Priestley was born in Portland, Oregon to Mae Irene and Arthur James Priestley. She grew up in a wooded area near the Willamette River with horses, dogs, a cat and a huge collection of comic books. Priestley began experimenting with animation early in her life. In an interview with Harvey Deneroff she explained: “One of the first toys I was given was a zoetrope, which worked on a little turntable and had little zoetrope strips with it. I loved it! I’m sure I became an animator because of that toy. Then I started drawing on the corners of my textbooks in grade school, and later studied art in high school and college, where I specializing in painting and printmaking.”

Education

Priestley studied painting and animation at Rhode Island School of Design and received a BFA in Art (with a minor in Art History) from the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with honors. During her final year there she produced thousands of posters used in protests against the Vietnam War and she was the Art Department representative to the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War.

Priestley received a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, where she received the Louis B. Mayer Award. For two years she was the teaching assistant for famed abstract animator Jules Engel. Priestley made the first computer animated film at Cal Arts, “Jade Leaf” (1985), using the Cubicomp, early animation hardware that was purchased by Cal Arts in the fall of 1984. Priestley and Engel co-directed “Times Square” (1986), also using the Cubicomp to generate images and recording them on a 16mm Bolex camera on a tripod, positioned in front of the monitor.

Career

In 1977, Priestley co-founded and co-directed (with Martha Kelley) Strictly Cinema in Bend, OR. They presented film festivals in Bend and weekly film screenings at Bend and Redmond High Schools. She became the Regional Coordinator, Editor of "The Animator" and Coordinator of the Northwest Film and Video Festival at the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum between 1978 and 1983. Gene Youngblood, one of the jurors of the Northwest Film and Video Festival, encouraged her to apply to Cal Arts. In 1988, Priestley founded ASIFA-Northwest with Marilyn Zornado. This ASIFA chapter included the northwest region of the United States which comprised Portland, Seattle, Vancouver B.C., and the areas in between. It is now known as ASIFA-Portland. Priestley was president of ASIFA-NW for four years.

Priestley founded her own company, Priestley Motion Pictures, in 1985, where she has directed, produced and animated 27 short films , an abstract feature film, (2017) and Clam Bake (2014), an iOS app. In 1995, Animated Women: Joanna Priestley,a documentary about her was broadcast on PBS and BBC2 and she has done animation pieces for Sesame Street ("The Lumps") and animated segments of music videos for Tears for Fears and Joni Mitchell.

Priestley has received fellowships from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts (USA), American Film Institute (USA), Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Millay Colony (USA), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Canada) and the Caldera Arts Foundation (USA). She was awarded the 2007-08 Media Arts Fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and her films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Academy Film Archive and the Library of Congress.

Priestley's influences include David Hockney, Jane Aaron, Hilma af Klint, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Jules Engel. She has taught animation, portfolio design and cinema history at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Northwest Film Center/Portland Art Museum, Art Institute of Portland and Volda University College (Volda Norway) as well as teaching animation workshops throughout the USA and in Canada, Germany and Norway. She is an active proponent of animation as an art form and has worked throughout her career to improve the status and exposure of animation in academia, museums, galleries and the media worldwide. Priestley has presented two papers at the Society for Animation Studies Conference, including "Creating a Healing Mythology: The Art of Faith Hubley" in 1992 and has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992.

"I love Joanna's films. They're brilliant, inventive and amazing. She's the queen of independent animation."—Bill Plympton

Filmography

Music videos

Television

Apps

Retrospectives

Awards/accolades

Personal life

Joanna Priestley is married to animation director and production designer Paul Harrod. Other interests include dancing, practicing medicinal herbalism and designing and producing events for Burning Man and Halloween. we