Nina Paley - Cartoonist, Animator, Free Culture Activist - The Stork, Sita Sings the Blues, Mimi & Eunice, The Prophet, This Land Is Mine, Seder-Masochism

Nina Paley started out as a comic strip artist, including for Fluff and The Hots, as the weekly Nina's Adventures and then shifted to make independent animated films, including the controversial yet popular environmental short, The Stork. In 2002, Nina followed her then-husband to Trivandrum, India, where she read her first Ramayana. This inspired her first feature film, Sita Sings the Blues, which she animated and produced single-handedly over the course of 5 years on a home computer, featuring the lost music of jazz vocal legend Annette Hanshaw. More recently, Nina worked on the segment On Children, a segment in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, and the short This Land Is Mine depicting the Middle East conflicts over history.  Her latest acclaimed feature film, Seder-Masochism, is an animated musical comedy-drama reinterpreting events from the Book of Exodus, especially stories associated with the Passover Seder.