Jeremy Speed Schwartz

Jeremy is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and CalArts, holding degrees in Film and Digital Media, Art History and Experimental Animation. Jeremy specializes in pixilation, stop motion, interactive and programmatic media. His recent work has focused on animation and interactive media in installation. As a founding member of “The League of Imaginary Scientists” he has exhibited recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bradley University, and The Outpost for Contemporary Art. He teaches film history and animation at the International School of Motion Pictures, and frequently lectures at other schools.
Jeremy has been working with The iotaCenter since 2005, and fills a handful of roles in daily operations, including webmaster, curator and producer.

Larry Cuba

Larry Cuba is widely recognized as a pioneer in the use of computers in animation art. Producing his first computer animation in 1974, Cuba was at the forefront of the computer-animation artists considered the “second generation” — those who directly followed the visionaries of the sixties: John Whitney, Sr., Stan Vanderbeek and Lillian Schwartz.
While still a graduate student at The California Institute of the Arts, he was convinced of the artistic potential of computer graphics, but this was years before art schools began teaching the subject. Cuba’s solution was to solicit access to the mainframe computers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and teach himself computer animation by producing his first film, First Fig. In 1975, John Whitney, Sr. invited Cuba to be the programmer on one of his films. The result of this collaboration was Arabesque.

Subsequently, Cuba produced three more computer-animated films: 3/78 (Objects and Transformations), Two Space, and Calculated Movements. These works were shown at film festivals throughout the world—including Los Angeles, Hiroshima, Zagreb and Bangkok—and have won numerous awards. Cuba’s been invited to present his work at various conferences such as Siggraph, ISEA, Ars Electronica, and Art and Math Moscow and his films have been included in screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Hirshhorn Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Amsterdam Filmmuseum and the Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo.

Cuba received grants for his work from the American Film Institute and The National Endowment for the Arts and was awarded a residency at the Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe (ZKM). He has served on the juries for the Siggraph Electronic Theater, the Montpellier Festival of Abstract Film, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and Ars Electronica.
For more information about Larry Cuba and his work, please visit website.

Audri Phillips

Audri Phillips is a Los Angeles based artist currently working in a variety of mediums that range from computer animations, video art (visual poetry), oil paintings and spoken word pieces (VJ style). She has also worked for over 25 years as an artist/digital artist in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles on feature films, games, ride films and commercials. She creates online content for Intel as well as a blog.

Always interested in new tools she has been a pioneer of using digital art in experimental film work. A founding member of the Los Angeles Abstract Film Group, Alternate Sight and a member of the Iota Center she has shown her personal digital videos/experimental animations at film festivals, such as, Not Still Art, 1995 Siggraph Animation Festival, the Los Angeles Film Forum at the Egyptian theater, Pacific Design Center, the Stereo Club of Southern California, BillBoard Live and one of her animations “Corroded Ethereal Visions” can be found on the Siggraph Video Review tapes for 1995.

For more information about Ms. Phillips and her work, please visit her website

Sara Petty

Sara Petty grew up in Texas and studied painting and animation at UCLA and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her film FURIES (1975), described as a study in movement and composition and an exploration of the mysterious consciousness, won 14 first place awards at international festivals, including the Ottawa and Chicago Film Festivals. Her subsequent work, PRELUDES IN MAGICAL TIME (1988), won the Independent Animation Award at the 1989 Animation Celebration Festival. Petty has animated pieces for Klasky-Csupo and Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles as well as the Beethoven section of FANTASIA 2000 for Disney.

Roberta Friedman

Roberta Friedman”™s work spans a large assortment of film and video productions that have been shown widely in the United States and Europe. Her projects have ranged from artistic, experimental work””such as her interactive video with Grahame Weinbren, The Erl King, recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection””to the commercial, working with George Lucas on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The Erl King premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, was installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial 1987 and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, among other galleries. It was presented at the Guggenheim Museum in March 2004, as part of a special exhibition involving migration of contemporary media.

In April 2010, her video installation, 49 Waltzes for the Gated City, partially funded with grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and Essex County Arts Council, premiered at the Montclair Art Museum. Her video realization of a graphic score by John Cage, 49 Waltzes for The Five Boroughs, was presented as part of the Cage retrospective Rolyholyover a Circus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the downtown Guggenheim Museum, and is now being distributed on DVD by Mode Records. Her experimental films have been selected to be preserved and housed by the Motion Picture Academy of Film and Television.

Roberta is currently a full-time professor in the film program at Montclair State University.

Pam Turner

Pamela Taylor Turner’s art began with photography and in the mid-1980’s expanded into the realm of the moving image, encompassing video, film, and computer animation. She graduated with a B.F.A. in Art History/Studio (1984) and a M.F.A. in Visual Communication/Electronic Media (1988). Since 1995 she has taught studio and lecture courses in new media, photography, and animation at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an associate professor in the department of Kinetic Imaging teaching animation and new media with an emphasis on mixing media and exploring the possibilities of expression through the creation of moving images and sound.

For more information about Ms. Turner and her work, please visit her website

 

Paul Shepherd

 

Paul current serves as the executive director.  He received his MFA from the USC animation department and has spent years in the filed of experimental cinema acting in the films of the Kuchar brothers and making his own work under the pen-name Huckleberry Lain.

 

Angela Diamond

In December the Board of Directors welcomed a new member, Angela Diamos. Angela has over 18 years professional experience in the feature animation and live action effects animation field. Angela was introduced to effects animation, motion controlled cameras and animating with light when she started her career working at Robert Abel and Assoc. Angela then went on to animate effects on film and TV productions such as Curious George, Tarzan, Hercules, Mulan, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek The Motion Picture.

Having realized the potential in time-based imagery Angela now explores the use of hand-drawn, photo-captured and digital imagery as an art medium. “It is important in my opinion for it’s inherent immersive and ephemeral qualities. This ephemeral quality of the image as a series of interpretable codes, no longer an object, is important in its relationship to space and time– reminding the viewer of the transient quality inherent in the spaces created and the time in which we exist.”

Angela now teaches as a full-time Professor of Animation at Woodbury University.