Biography

Lynn Tomlinson is an independent producer, filmmaker and animator. She directs her own production company, Summer Kitchen Studio. With a team of scholars and artists at UCF, she is helping create a website on Florida folk artists, www.Folkvine.org, funded by the Florida Humanities Council. In the spring of 2004, she collaborated with a mixed-age elementary school class to create Shopping for Utopia, a cut-out animated tour of kids’ ideal societies. She has just completed a similar educational collaboration with five fifth-grade girls, supported by a Professional Development grant from United Arts of Central Florida. “Girls of the World” animates the stories of five diverse girls from history who made an impact on the world:

Girls of the World

Tomlinson's specialty is clay-on-glass animation. By spreading colored modeling clay on a light table, she creates images that are vibrant, tactile, and colorful -- like moving finger paintings or animated stained glass. Her films are remarkable for their painterly quality and metamorphoses from one scene to the next. You can see some of her work online at www.lynntomlinson.blogspot.com.

Her independent films, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, Paper Walls, and Cauldron, and short educational spots, have been screened at numerous international film and video festivals, including the prestigious Ottawa International Animation Festival, and the Black Maria Film Festival. Her work has been screened on public television and on Bravo and is included in a video compilation of short award-winning films.

Tomlinson was commissioned by the Independent Television Service to create ten short clay-on-glass animated spots, featuring educational messages on such topics as word play, mixing colors, and cooperation. These spots are broadcast nationally on PBS stations, and were screened at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She created two spots for Sesame Street, one featuring the letter P, the other on early reading. Clients include MTV, Johnson & Johnson, and Blackside, Inc. Her most recent commercial production is a series of animated links for the Fry Hammond Barr advertising agency website, www.fhbnet.com. Awards for her work include Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards, numerous grants, and fellowships inclducing a 2006 Individual Artist Fellowship from the state of Florida.

Tomlinson began animating as an undergraduate majoring in English at Cornell University. She continued her studies in animation at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, earning a master’s degree in Art Education. She also received an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where she studied ethnographic video, and wrote a thesis on the history of the film dream sequence. In addition to media arts, she works in sculpture and ceramics at the Crealdé School of Art.

Tomlinson spends summers in Ithaca, NY, where she teaches animation at Cornell University. Before moving to Florida, she was associate professor of animation in the Media Arts department the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at Tufts College, Stockton Sate College, and The Art Institute of Philadelphia.

Artist Statement

My work portrays transformations and metamorphoses, and stories of people and their place in the natural and social environment. I am drawn towards literature, stories about women and their lives, and whimsical humor in the pieces I create. My projects often involve detailed research into history and society; I enjoy the learning process as much as the production process. My innovative, painterly animation technique, clay-on-glass animation, uses colored modeling clay spread on sheets of underlit glass to create luminous, tactile images. I also use stop-motion and cut-out animation, and enjoy the spontaneity of these “under the camera” techniques, in which the animation is created and recorded directly, frame by frame. While I use digital tools to record the hand-made images, I strive to make the work not look computerized, avoiding a smooth, mechanized style in favor of a hand-rendered aesthetic.

I have worked as a social documentarian for the past few years for www.folkvine.org, documenting Florida folk artists, their communities and their work. I am also involved in a series of collaborative educational projects with children, teaching through animation. I am developing a half-hour program for public broadcast, called Do We Amuse You?, a project that merges animation and documentary. What is it like when your job is the world’s vacation? Animated sequences will portray people’s stories about working in the business of amusement in Central Florida.