Audience Choice Award!
Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational 2016

Congratulations to Jaime Rodriguez for his film A Prank Time - Winner of the 2016 Sweaty Eyeballs Audience Choice Award!
View the 2016 Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational Program HERE

Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational is Back!
Friday, October 14, 2016

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The 5th Annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational returns to the MICA Brown Center with a radical variety of international, independent short animations. Curated by Phil Davis (Towson University) and Max Porter (Maryland Institute College of Art); including narrative, experimental, and music video work made with a variety of techniques ranging from stop motion, hand drawn, to CGI. Come out for a night of weird and wonderful animation and cast your vote for the audience choice award!
Check out the 2016 lineup of animators here.

Sweaty Eyeballs is brought to you by the Animation Department of the Maryland Institute College of Art, the department of Art + Design, Art History, and Art Education at Towson University, and the Maryland Film Festival.

5th Annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational Screening
Friday October 14, 2016
7:30 PM
Falvey Hall Auditorium - MICA Brown Center
1300 W. Mount Royal Ave. Baltimore, MD
$5 ticket price
FREE for students (with valid student ID), University faculty/staff, and 
Friends of the Maryland Film Festival
Sweaty Eyeballs 2016 - Animator Bios
Andy Kennedy (USA)
Andy Kennedy is a filmmaker, animator, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is interested in visualizing sound in unconventional ways. Working primarily in 3D computer animation, Andy deforms everyday objects in playful and unsettling ways.
Miranda Javid (USA)
​Miranda Javid is a writer, animator and art-educator. She has shown at Commune1 in Cape Town, South Africa, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA. She is a Kenan Fellow, a member of the Drawing Center's Viewing Program and a recipient of the Nancy Harrigan Prize, given through the Baker Artist Fund. Currently, she lives in Los Angeles, where she's been trying for years to write a bio that sounds right. Miranda spends her time studying the history of violence and takes long walks when she's trying to think of narrative ideas. Also, she keeps bees.
Kangmin Kim (Republic of Korea / USA)
Kangmin Kim, founder of Studio Zazac is award winning filmmaker and designer based in LA. His films have been screened at many festivals such as Sundance, Clermont-Fd, Annecy, Ottawa, SXSW, Zagreb, and AFI. He is a highly creative and multitalented stop motion artist and designer with a strong background in stop motion, graphic design. He has been concentrating on creative visualization using hand crafted media with designed backgrounds.
Nicolas Brault (Canada)
Nicolas Brault won the National Film Board of Canada’s Cinéaste recherché(e) contest in 2000. Since then, his films have explored many forms and varied subjects, and have earned him numerous awards in film festivals. The Circus (2011) had him vying for the Best Animated Film at the 37th César Awards. Since 2012, he has developed a series of non-narrative short films and immersive projections around the human body. From this series, Foreign Bodies (2013) won the “Off - Limits” award at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival in 2014.
Volker Schlecht & Alexander Lahl (Germany)
Volker Schlecht works as an Illustrator and Filmmaker in Berlin. He studied communication design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, later on he taught at the animation department of the HFF Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg. Currently he works as a professor of sequential illustration at the BTK University of Art and Design. Together with Alexandra Kardinar he founded their collaborative label Drushba Pankow in 2002. Schlecht was born 1968 in Radeberg.
Alexander Lahl was born 1979 in Berlin (GDR). He studied cultural sciences in Berlin, Wroclaw and Frankfurt (Oder). He works as a writer, filmmaker and producer and co-founded the media label Die Kulturingenieure. Latest work together with Max Mönch: "Treibsand. A graphic novel about the last days of the GDR“, published by Metrolit. Currently he is working mainly on oceans subjects.
Nina Gantz (Netherlands / United Kingdom)
Amsterdam born Nina Gantz, grew up in Rotterdam. From an early age, as the daughter of a theatre technician and an actress, she spent much of her time meeting weird and wonderful characters and watching countless theatre productions. From these early influences, she developed a keen sense for visual storytelling and from the age of four, she began drawing lessons with Dutch artist AMC Fok, something which can be seen in her current style. Whilst attending St Joost Art school in Breda, Gantz discovered her passion for animation and produced her first notable hand drawn film, Zaliger (2010), which went on to be selected at 37 festivals winning the Golden Panda for best student film at the Sichuan Festival in China. After setting up Studio Gantz in Rotterdam, she was commissioned, to be head of animation for a live action feature film in the Netherlands, Toegetakeld door de liefde (dir. Ari Deelder). In 2013 Gantz began a Masters in directing animation at the National Film and Television School (UK) where she filmed her first stop motion film EDMOND. Currently she’s teamed up with Simon Cartwright as Cartwright Gantz and have been doing multiple projects.
Paul Johnson (Canada)
Paul has been working in animation since 1995, and has been credited on over 20 TV, direct-to-video, and theatrical projects as well as teaching animation for 15 years. His most recent independent short film "Begone Dull Care 2015" is currently playing in festivals worldwide.
Jaime Rodriguez (USA)
Jaime Rodriguez is a 2d animator / 2d artist working out of Kearny, NJ.  He has worked in TV, with Bill Plympton and Christy Karacas, and independently. 
Lauren Puglisi (USA)
Lauren Puglisi is a 2016 MICA Animation Alumni. She is now a Digital Production Designer at PBS and PBS KIDS after spending the summer as a Digital Animation Intern.
Kaspar Jancis (Estonia)
Born on May 8, 1975 in Tallinn. He has been interested since childhood in drawing comic strips and writing stories for which he made illustrations himself.  His first moving pictures came into being in the corners of his school notebooks. He enrolled at the Tallinn Pedagogical University in 1996. He completed his first films at that school - the silent film "Dr. Maisarve and the Matshalka Case" (1996) and the cutout puppet film "Flight of the Little White Helicopter" (1996), which was screened at rock concerts and also on television.  He transferred from the Pedagogical University to the Turku Arts and Media School in Finland in 1997 to study animation under the guidance of Priit Pärn. He made his debut film "Romance" (1999) in Turku, and it has participated in several international film festivals.
Gina Kamentsky (USA)
Gina Kamentsky creates kinetic sculptures which exist in the somewhat chaotic and messy real world and animated films for the screen where gravity is a bit less of a concern. Her current artistic concern involves invoking the sweet spot where representation and surface push and pull each other like a two-headed lama. She is pursuing this by drawing and painting images directly on film stock, a technique, known as Direct Animation.
Spela  Cadez (Slovenia)
​Spela Cadez was born in Slovenia 1977. After graduating in Graphic Design in 2002 she continued her studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany. During her studies she made two puppet animations that gained international recognition: Mate to Measure (2004) and Lovesick (2007). Since 2008 Spela Cadez has been working as an independent animation director and producer. Her latest film Boles has been screened worldwide, receiving 50 awards, distinctions and nominations.
Rune Spaans (Norway)
Norwegian director and designer Rune Spaans has over 20 years of experience in design, animation and visual effects. He has contributed animation and VFX to films such as Monster Thursday (2004) and Trollhunter (2010), and directed several award winning commercials. He has directed two animated feature films together with Rasmus A. Sivertsen: Ploddy the Police Car on the Case (2013) and Two Buddies and a Badger (2015). The Absence of Eddy Table is his first short film.