Suzanne Buchan Receives Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies

Animation academic and researcher Suzanne Buchan will be the recipient of the 2023 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies by Animafest Zagreb Festival.

Suzanne Buchan is considered one of the most important contemporary animation researchers and teachers in the world – currently a professor and Head of MA Animation at the Royal College of Art, and previously as the director of the Art and Design Research Institute (ADRI) and a professor of animation aesthetics at the University of Middlesex in London, she set the highest standards in animation teaching. In terms of research in this dynamic field, her development of the Animation Research Centre in 2000, which she also was director of, is of utmost importance.

She taught animation in Zurich, where she also obtained her Ph.D. in film studies, so it is not surprising to find her research papers available in both English and German. She indebted animation studies as one of the founders and editors of the scholarly Animation. An Interdisciplinary Journal and she was one of the founders and directors of the Fantoche animation festival.

In her research she has particularly focused on manipulated moving image aesthetics and theory, with a special accent on digital culture and experimental cinema in relation to animation, always using interdisciplinary approaches and setting animation in the context of culture, arts, technology, and moving images as such, always appealing to the contributions from related studies and other arts. The books of particular importance in her work are 'The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom' (2011), 'Pervasive Animation: An AFI Film Reader' (2013), and 'Animated ''Worlds''' (2006), but she also mentors doctoral researchers.

She has written a number of individual papers and essays which set the standards of contemporary, media, and theoretically conscious animation studies. In these research papers, she studies, for example, contemporary tendencies in portraying the life of the Inuit in Canadian animation, a feminist vision of the body in animation, the comical in animation, theoretical models of animation studies, and other intriguing topics, and her curatorial work on the exhibition Animierte Wunderwelten/Animated Wonderworlds in Zurich (2015-2016) is considered particularly important.

The Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies will be presented to her at the 33rd World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb, 5-10 June 2023.

Suzanne Buchan will also be a keynote speaker at Animafest Scanner X 2023 - Symposium for Contemporary Animation Studies which will take place 6-7 June 2023.