Allison Schulnik

Allison Schulnik is an animator, painter, potter and dancer.  She spent a long time in LA, perfecting her craft, before now touching down in the desert. Her animation is very traditional, and that won her many prestigious awards at SXSW and the Ottawa film festivals. She collaborated with various musicians to bring their music to life through visuals. Her work was included in many international film festivals across the world, like Annecy film festival in france, Animafest in Croatia, and the hammer museum in Los Angeles to name a few. She also had solo exhibits at various galleries across the world as well.

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I had discovered Allison Schulnik's work a couple years ago, and loved all her work. It was amazing to watch. When I saw that she was coming to our seminar class, I was really excited for it, because I had loved her work for a while. It felt like stumbling into a world where paint, clay, and emotion were all alive, and constantly reshaping themselves. There’s something so raw and apologetically tactile about her practice that it immediately drew me in. I love how she doesn’t smooth anything over; instead, she leans into the mess, the texture, the heaviness. It’s like she trusts that beauty can come from distortion, from excess, from bodies that are melting and re-forming right in front of you. As someone who works with experimental mediums too, I could feel that physicality, the push, the drag, the weight of making—embedded in every frame.

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Watching her stop-motion film Mound in particular was such a visceral experience for me. It genuinely felt like I was entering a painting that refused to stay still. Figures made of clumped clay and fabric seemed to breathe, sag, collapse, and rise again, almost like they were caught in a loop between life and decay. I remember feeling mesmerized by how slow and deliberate their movements were, yet how emotional they felt. The transitions weren’t clean or polished, but that’s exactly why they worked. The imperfections became their language. When she said she sometimes only does 2 frames a day, it was astonishing and incredibly impressive how she has that much patience to create a whole film. My respect for her grew immensely at that moment

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Experiencing Schulnik’s work in this way made me rethink my own relationship with materials. She reminded me that animation doesn’t have to be precise or elegant to be powerful. It can be messy, heavy, emotional, and still feel incredibly alive.

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