Animation Made for Teen Audiences 13+

Kat Messing is an independent stop-motion filmmaker from Maine, now living in North Hollywood, California with her two black kitties. Her resourceful, scrappy filmmaking process introduces audiences to her outlook on life and her imaginary friends. With quirky humor, nuanced character animation, and poignant social observations, she hopes her films inspire introspection about the world, its peculiar inhabitants, and our place within it.

Grace An (b. 1992, Toronto) is an animation artist and filmmaker from Lindsay, Ontario, now based in Montréal. Her shorts were produced in programs by the National Film Board of Canada and have been screened across Canada. Her most recent short Cabbage Daddy, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. She holds a BFA in Film Animation from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Master of Art, Media, and Design from OCAD University. There, she is currently a faculty member in the Experimental Animation program.

Yehor Holovkov is Ukrainian animator, director, editor, and writer based in Kyiv. He has eight years of experience in stop-motion, frame-by-frame drawing, and motion design with rig-based animation.

Hi there, I’m Jett Ulysses! I’m a writer, independent director, voice actor and illustrator based bi-coastally in NYC & LA. I have experience with both narrative and experimental animation, and I’m currently available for work on freelance or part time projects in animation, comics & illustration, video games, music videos or voice acting. I love tabletop RPGs, ghosts, jewel tones, mixed media, and tea. You can reach me via email, or via instagram and discord @peachemoth.

Luka Vucić was born in 1982 in Zagreb. He graduated from the School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. He works as a freelance artist in his own studio, where he has been producing, designing, illustrating, making videos, logos, animation, and everything that comes to his mind. His main area of interest is stop animation. He is a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association and Croatian Designers Society.

Vinny Wang, Cathy “Caz” Shen & Vanessa Buice met at the Rhode Island School of Design in its Film/Animation/Video program. Following their student careers developing independent short films, they joined forces post-graduation for a collaborative film-making experiment – which became Welcome to StarMart.

They now reside in Los Angeles and are working to keep making cool animation. They, alongside other creatives, make up the Artists Against the Apocalypse artists’ collective: a group dedicated to fostering collaboration and community through art and animation.

Julie Charette studied fine arts and animation at Concordia University, where she developed a strong interest in messy mediums, traditional animation and under the camera work. Her graduation film Milk Teeth has been selected in numerous international festivals. Since then, she has worked as an animator on several independant short and feature films. In 2026, she finished the production of her first professional animated film, The Comet, produced by Embuscade Films.

Nikita Greer is a Toronto-based filmmaker and illustrator working in fashion. Her work explores self-perception and identity through character-driven stories shaped by world-building and design.

Abbey Collings is a multidisciplinary animator with a bachelor’s degree in Animation from Sheridan College. She strives to create work that embraces imperfections through the handcrafted nature of stop-motion filmmaking and focuses on finding joy and having fun in every aspect of creation.

Lea Vučko is a Slovenian animation director and illustrator. She studied illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, where she first developed her interest in storytelling through images. After graduation, she shifted her focus toward animation, working as an animator on several acclaimed short films and commercial projects.

Since 2015, she has collaborated on titles including Prince Ki-Ki-Do (Grega Mastnak, 2016), Weasel (Timon Leder, 2017), and Špela Čadež’s Orange Is the New Black commission for Netflix (2018). She also worked on Somewhere Else (Tim Grabnar, 2018), among others.

In 2022, she made her directorial debut with The Legend of Goldhorn, a short animated film inspired by Slovenian folklore, which was screened at over 80 international festivals. She is the co-founder of Octopics, an independent studio she runs with her creative partner Damir Grbanović.

Lea is currently in distribution of her second animated short, The Girl Who Wasn’t Afraid of Bears, produced by Invida, while developing new original projects under the Octopics banner.

Anh Tú Nguyen (*1998) is a visual artist, animator and animation director from Germany. After school he worked as an
intern and freelancer at Studio FILM BILDER. In 2023 he graduated from the ABK Stuttgart with a diploma in communication design.

Currently he‘s studying animation directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and teaching analogue animation at the ABK Stuttgart.