Artist Statement/ Biography

Caitlin Craggs is an animator, multidisciplinary artist and educator living in Brooklyn. She directs “bona fide weird” animation for music videos, documentary and TV, and currently teaches animation at Pratt Institute and The New School. She also makes playful films, zines and objects that distill and elaborate her thoughts around subjects where the authority of master narratives rubs against the reality of lived experience— issues of history, ecology, power, identity and media. Caitlin's practice weaves together many modes of film and art making: stop-motion, collage, studio-photography, puppetry, clowning, dance, projection, trick-film, practical effects and live-action filmmaking. An abiding fascination with the way that language and narrative structures our perception of the world always propels her work. At the most basic level, she makes things that engender curiosity, rendering the world stranger and more luminous.

--

Caitlin's animated eco-comedy series “Insexcapades” was workshopped through the 2019 Sundance YouTube New Voices Lab. Her experimental essay film “The corn doesn’t pay the corn” was invited to the 2019 Film Lab at SPACE on Ryder Farm. Her surreal short film “Are you tired of forever?” received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short at Slamdance (2018) and Best Student Work on Screen at Images (2018). Caitlin's work has been featured on the New York Times, The Atlantic and Cartoon Brew, and has received Vimeo Staff Picks for the short films “Tomato,” a meditation on veggies and colonialism, and “Touch,” a commission for an educational animated series about neurobiology and the senses. As an undergraduate, she was a Princess Grace Grantee for her animated film “Lintscape,” a stop-mo flick about killer lint. She holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts.