Miwa Matreyek

Artist, Atheist, Brainstormer, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Filmmaker, Performer, Technologist

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and multi-media artist working in Los Angeles. She creates animated short films as well as works that integrate animation and live performance/installation via projection. Matreyek is interested in how animation transforms when it is combined with body and space (and vice-versa) and takes on a more physical and present quality, while body and space take on a more fantastical quality. On one hand, Matreyek's performance can be viewed as a cinematic experience taking place on a screen. On the other hand, what is seen on the screen is a collapsed product of multiple layers of animation, objects and body. Her work exists in a juxtaposition of illusion and non-illusion. She is one of the founding-member and core-collaborator of the performance media group, Cloud Eye Control, who makes theatrical productions with cleverly integrated animation projections. Their new work, 'Under Polaris' opened at REDCAT in Los Angeles in the fall of 2009, and will be a part of the EXIT Festival in Paris in March, 2010 Her work has been featured at REDCAT, Time-Based Arts Festival, SF International Film Festival, Platform International Animation Festival, and the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe. Her short films have been shown at the Tricky Women's Film Festival, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival, LA Freewaves, Platform International Animation Festival, and San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival A recent graduate from CalArt's Experimental Animation and Integrated Media program, she won the Student Grand Prize for her performance, 'Dreaming of Lucidly Living', at the Platform International Animation Festival