Laura Heit

Laura Heit is the author of Animation Sketchbooks, a big book of drawings, lists, doodles and unpublic scratches by some of independent animations biggest names. ‘It is a rare thing that you get to see inside an artist’s sketchbook, so I count myself very lucky to have been able to spend the last two years combing through the wonderful, unseen pages of doodles, drawings, and pasted on bits-and-bobs that comprise the pages of animators’ visual diaries. These sketchbooks are the equivalent of a sleeper’s dream catcher – they are filled with an animator’s (often private and personal) scribbled-down skeletons and seeds of moving images and short films.

Laura Heit is a moving image maker, and performance artist. Laura employs stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing, and computer animation in her short films. Her award winning work has screened extensively at museums and film festivals around the world including; Walker Arts center, Moma, Guggenheim, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, Annecy, Rotterdam, Taiwan, Ann Arbor, and London International Film Festivals, Black Maria, PBS, and others. She also works in puppetry, experimental theater, and live performance. Her acclaimed puppet-show-in miniature, The Matchbox Shows, in which Heit plays ringmaster to a tiny cabaret, has been touring for over ten years, St. Ann's Warehouse Brooklyn, REDCAT and Walt Disney Concert Hall Los Angeles, and TBA festival Portland OR. She was co-director of the Cal Arts Experimental Animation Program form 2006-2011, and currently teaches at PNCA. She lives and works in Portland OR.