BIO:

Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist. Her work has involved: experimental animation, collage, printmaking, curatorial projects, full moon artist salons, drawing clubs, sleep concerts in giant wooden fort structures, puppet shows, making clothing and textile designs, renegade fashion shows in the Paris Metro, domestic ‘happenings’, collective skill-sharing and various collaborative projects involving visual music. Maya’s hand-crafted animations and collages are inspired by imaginary worlds, memories and the unconscious. Her animations explore a hybrid approach to cut-paper stop-motion, puppetry, hand-drawn, digital animation and installation. Her work has been shown in national and international film festivals, galleries, museums and DIY venues. She was a 2020 City of Boston Artist Fellow, the recipient of a 2019 Yaddo Residency, a 2018 WGBH Launchpad Residency, a 2017 Brother Thomas Fellowship Award and the 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Film. She curated the highly regarded group animation show “The Skin has Eyes: Animated Visions” at the Mills Gallery in Boston in 2019.

Maya is a 2012 MFA graduate in Experimental Animation from CalArts. She first studied animation at Harvard University. Maya is currently finishing an experimental animated documentary about her refugee grandmother’s marvelous life, and developing several large-scale installation projects and two solo shows in the city of Boston slated to open in 2022. Maya is a Colombian/Hungarian first-generation American. Born and raised bilingually in New York City, she is currently based in Boston. She lives with her husband Daniel, also an animator, and their child Paloma. 

Maya is a Faculty member in Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and was recently a guest lecturer in Animation at the Rhode Island School of Design & Pratt Institute. Maya has given Guest Artist talks and workshops at various Universities and museums including: Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, MICA, UPenn, MassArt, The University of Illinois Chicago, Emerson College, Montserrat College of Art, and the ICA Boston, among others.

Clients and Collaborators include:

ICA Boston, Google, Samuels & Associates, Emily Fine Art, art_works, Montserrat Gallery, Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, Longstreet Gallery, The Boston Center for the Arts, Topic, Isenberg Projects, Harvard Business Publishing, Huffington Post, VICE, Intel, Children’s Documentary Network, TV on the Radio, Michel Gondry, Aaron Rose, Levi’s, Toyota, among others. 

SAY HELLO: mayaerdelyi@gmail.com

STATEMENT:

I’m a collagist; cutting, sourcing, and colliding memories and imaginary realms into animations and 3-D paper works. My work braids together various animation and visual processes: cut-paper, stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, collage, puppetry, printmaking and experimental direct-on-film techniques within hybrid digital worlds. I often use bold colors, patterns and found paper textures. The final artworks exist as animated films, artifacts, collages and installations. Through my own search for meaning in dreams, memories and the nature of reality, my films, collages and projects aim to create a space of wonder to contemplate life, death & magic.

Some current inspiration for my work includes:

the language of dreams, color theory, vibrational aesthetics, psychology, Pee-Wee’s playhouse, fungi, children’s books, bees, Stuart Davis, Judy Pfaff, sound baths, synesthesia, Japanese ryokans, anything homemade/homespun, Buckminster Fuller, dinner parties (outside!), paper mache masks, shadow puppets, the Japanese concept of ichigo ichie, quilts, and the game ‘write-draw-write.’