Instructor: Maya Erdelyi
Monday - Friday
August 4 - 8
9am - 12pm
5 sessions
Open Studio: Mon - Thurs, 1pm - 4pm

Animation is a magical medium. With it we create worlds and explore dreams, memories, stories and the ineffable. This course is designed to immerse students in the poetic and practical aspects of creating animation. Each day we will be exploring different approaches to animation. Students will explore some of the fundamentals of animated movement, timing, and materials through various animation techniques, including working directly on film, drawing on paper, pixilation, cut-out puppet animation, and other stop-motion experiments under the camera. Through in-class exercises, demos and screenings you will learn different approaches to animating. The course will include screenings of animations past and present, along with discussions and crits. Class will end with a celebration and screening of work.

materials list

Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist. Her works span experimental animation, installation, drawing, printmaking, and collaborative experiments. Screenings and shows include national and international film festivals, galleries, libraries, museums and artist-run venues including: Lincoln Center, MFA Boston, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, REDCAT Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, Animation Block Party, and Boston Center for the Arts, among others.

Recent highlights include: acquisitions of her film ANYUKA into the permanent collections of The Jewish Museum in NYC and The Block Museum of Contemporary Art at Northwestern University in Chicago. Other news: a recent Jury Award at the 2024 Woods Hole Film Festival; a broadcast license with PBS and GBH is set to begin in December; and a family art residency in the summer of 2025 at Marble House Project. A forthcoming exhibit in the fall of 2025 will happen at the Jewish Museum of NYC. Past shows and projects include: a solo show at Room 68, Provincetown (2023); a solo show at Trustman Gallery at Simmons University (2022), artist workshops at the ICA Boston (2022), and a Yaddo Residency (2019). Her work is in the collections of Google, Hotel Studio Allston, Isenberg Projects, and numerous private collections.

Maya is a Colombian/Hungarian first-generation American. Born and raised bilingually in New York City, she is currently based in Boston where she teaches animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and lectures at numerous universities. Maya holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from Calarts and first studied animation at Harvard University. She lives with her husband, an animator, and their daughter Paloma, and is always working on some kind of experiment. Maya is deeply inspired by the Outer Cape, this is her third summer teaching at Castle Hill.

Other fun links:
This write up in the Boston Globe (2024)
This write up in Boston Art Review (2024)