Guggenheim Fellow and San Francisco Art Institute Alum Christiane Cegavske grew up among the dark firs and gnarly oaks of Oregon. The woodland environment left a permanent mark upon her creative work, in which her anthropomorphic creatures live out their dramas in natural settings. Cegavske’s work blurs the boundaries between fine art and animation and her gallery art supports and enhances her films, using dreamlike motifs in different mediums.
Cegavske is best known for the award-winning Blood Tea and Red String (2006), a stop-motion film with a passionate worldwide fanbase. It received rave reviews in The New York Times, New York Post, Variety, Fangoria, Cartoon Brew and many more, and has been named in critics lists including 7 Best Stop-Motion Animated Movies of All Time (Cinemaholic), 15 Best Surrealist Movies of The 21st Century (Taste of Cinema), Animated Films by Solo Artists (Cartoon Brew) and 10 Stunning Animated Movies Directed by Women (Screenrant).
Her career as an animator and sculptor for television and film includes work for The Oxygen Network, VH1, the Disney Channel and Fox at Space Bass Films and Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles and Bent Image Lab in Portland, Oregon, and on animated sequences for Asia Argento’s film, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. She designed and fabricated the puppet heads for Space Bass Films’ stop-motion animated sequence produced for NBC’s A Very Pentatonix Christmas in 2017.
Cegavske once more taps into the spellbinding possibilities of stop-motion animation with her new feature project in production, Seed in the Sand. Doll sirens sing and sand waves crash on rocky shores in a dreamlike world that is part dystopian science fiction and part magical fable.
