From the release:
Renee is a Chinese-American director and animator from Houston, Texas now based in London. After graduating from Harvard University, Renee – like many Blinkink directors – honed her craft at the National Film & Television School.
Her graduation film ‘O Black Hole’ features a woman who can’t stand the passing of time turning herself into a black hole. It is currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit, including the Chicago Film Festival and the London Short Film Festival, with shortlists at the student BAFTAs and SXSW. You can watch the full film here.
Her work explores a range of topics such as body, nature and sexuality. Yet all of her films are well balanced between the lovely and the visceral with pockets of dark humour emerging when you least expect it. Renee has a real knack for finding beauty in everything and the end product is deeply satisfying to watch.
Renee uses lots of different textures and materials that have a tactile feel to create work full of richness. From hand-drawn 2D to watercolour to claymation, she is constantly pushing boundaries so that every project is uniquely different.
The nomadic Texan wrote “Reneepoptosis”, the first film she made after graduating whilst on a travelling fellowship in Japan. Renee simply describes this as “a bunch of Renees who go on a quest to find God, who’s also me”. It’s brilliant. The film was screened at TIFF, SXSW, Locarno and won the Jury Prize for Animated Short at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. You can watch it here.
There’s a tonne of amazing films to come from Renee. Her other film “Soft Animals” has also been screened at Annecy, TIFF, Edinburgh, Encounters, and Doc Leipzig.
She was also one of the featured animators of our episode of “Off The Air’ for Adult Swim. We were the 3rd ever guest-curators of the long-running series; our episode was a smorgasbord of animation and live-action directors, musicians, visual artists and comedians, thematically mushed together into 11-minute episodes, which Renee punctuated with her distinctive style.
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