Joanna Priestley (born November 25, 1950[1]) is an American contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive[2] in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute,[3] Museum of Modern Art [4] and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan.[5] Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
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,[6] 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.[7] 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[8] to generate images and recording them on a 16mm Bolex camera on a tripod, positioned in front of the monitor.
Joanna Priestley at an exhibition of her animation art (watercolor and ink on index cards) from Voices, Main Gallery, California Institute of the Arts in 1985
Career
In 1977, Priestley co-founded and co-directed (with Martha Kelley) Strictly Cinema in Bend, Oregon. 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 from 1978 to 1983. Gene Youngblood, one of the jurors of the Northwest Film and Video Festival, encouraged her to apply to Cal Arts, which she did in 1983. 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. Priestley was president of ASIFA-NW for four years. The organization is now known as ASIFA-Portland.
In 1985 she founded her own company, Priestley Motion Pictures, where she has directed, produced and animated 31 short films,[9] the IOS app Clam Bake[10] (2014) and the award winning abstract feature film North of Blue[11],. Animated Women: Joanna Priestley,[12] a short documentary with three of Priestley's films, was broadcast on PBS and BBC2 in 1995–96.[13] Priestley has directed animation segments for Sesame Street ("“The Lumps: Rejection Victories” and “The Lumps: Social Skills”, 1990), and directed and animated music video sequences for Tears for Fears (“Sowing the Seeds of Love”, 1988) and Joni Mitchell (“Good Friends”, 1985) and a PBS series title: “Making Peace” (1996). After directing and producing short films from 1979 to 2015, Priestley made an abstract feature film, North of Blue, which premiered at the Annecy International Animation Festival[14] in France in June, 2018. North of Blue has won multiple awards, including Best Experimental Film at the Indie Film Awards (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Best Animated Film at the Yosemite International Film Festival (CA, USA),[15] Best Feature Film at the Los Angeles Animation Festival (CA, USA)[16] and Best Sound Design Award and Best Feature Original Score Award at the Local Sightings Film Festival, NW Film Forum (Seattle, WA, USA).[17]
Priestley has received fellowships from Creative Capital,[18] National Endowment for the Arts (USA),[19] American Film Institute (USA),[20] Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Millay Colony (USA), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Canada)[21] and the Caldera Arts Foundation (USA). She was awarded the 2007-08 Media Arts Fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council[22] and her films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY, USA), the Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles, CA, USA) and the Library of Congress (Washington DC, USA).
Priestley has been an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992 and the Short Films and Feature Animation Executive Committee (2018 to 2022). She has served on the board of the Regional Arts and Culture Council and been a member of the Public Art Committee in Portland, Oregon.
