CCA Animation presents the Life After School Series this Fall. Join us for three visiting artist talks exploring unique paths from artists who graduated from animation programs. In this series we will meet a current animation masters student (Erin McCann 10/1), an animator who is attending law school at Berkeley Law (Eva Minh Châu Liebovitz 10/12), and a curator/historian who is podcasting and writing about animation (Sam Gurry/Smear Frame Podcast 11/5). Each talk will include a brief Q&A with the audience.

About Sam:

Sam Gurry is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, curator, and educator whose work foregrounds the raw, the tactile, and the fevered in animation and moving image.

Gurry’s work, which blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, has screened internationally at festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, IFFR, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival amongst others. Gurry was awarded a 2024 ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Educators Forum grant to support the creation of their next film, furthering their research into animation’s relationship to memory, decay, and the physicality of the image.

As the founder of Animation Brüt, Gurry champions experimental and non narrative animation, creating space for works that resist commercial polish and embrace material intervention. Their curatorial projects have been presented at Slamdance, Rockaway Beach Film Festival, and San Diego Underground Film Festival, among others, and they are currently an associative programmer at LA Filmforum.

In addition to their curatorial practice, Gurry is an educator, teaching at California State University, Los Angeles, USC, and NYU, where they foster conversations around animation’s radical potential as both personal expression and cultural critique. They have an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (rip),

They are the creator and host of the animation podcast & newsletter, Smear Frame.

About Smear Frame Podcast:

I like weird animation. I make weird animation. And I talk about it too on Smear Frame, my podcast dedicated to independent animation and the people who obsess over it. It’s interviews, musings, and deep dives into the history, the artists, disasters, new favorites. The love. The frames. Animation is a unique, cool, diverse art form and I want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about your production calendar though (but I do want you to finish your film and then send it to me).

Smear Frame Podcast is recorded in California. Inspired by the 1970s series The Screening Room and every artist who ever made something move out of trash and obsession.