Miwa Matreyek is an internationally recognized animator, designer, and multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. She creates animated short films as well as live works that integrate animation, performance, and video installation. Arriving to animation from a background in collage, her work explores how animation transforms when it is combined with body, both physically in her performance pieces, as well as a composited video element in her short films.
In her projection-based performances, animation takes on a more physical and present quality, while body and space take on a more fantastical quality, creating an experience that is both cinematic and theatrical. She is interested in the slippery meeting point of cinema and theater/performance, the moments of convergence where fantastical illusions are created, and the moments of divergence where the two struggle against each other.
Her work has been shown internationally at animation/film festivals, theater festivals, performance festivals, as well as art galleries, science museums, tech conferences, universities, and more.
Some past presentations include TEDGlobal (UK), Sundance Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Anima Mundi Animation Festival (Brazil), Time Based Arts Festival, REDCAT, ISEA, Theatre de la Cité (France), the Exploratorium, EXIT festival, Fusebox Festival, S8 (Spain), Animasivo (Mexico), Pixilerations, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, City of Women (Slovenia), Santiago a Mil (Chile), Manipulate (UK), and more.
Matreyek received her MFA (2007) in experimental animation and integrated media at the California Institute of the Arts. She is a founding-member and core-collaborator of Cloud Eye Control.
Portrait by Colin Young Wolff
