On Collaboration:

Donna Dodson, K. Melchor Hall, Trina Baker, Cyrenity Augustin, Pilar Duvivier, (Brandeis SSPs), and Paola Colon, (Lesley University intern) will discuss their experiences working on collaborative projects with large teams.

Donna Dodson is a current Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, a recent Fulbright US Scholar at Q21/Museums Quartier in Vienna Austria with her host institution Tricky Women/Tricky Realities, the world’s first and only animation festival for women artists, and a current member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Dodson is a graduate of Wellesley College and she has won grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire Guild of Woodworkers and the George Sugarman Foundation. Her work is many public museum and private artcollections. Donna’s work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Sculpture Magazine, The Daily Beast.

Trina Baker has shown her paintings, drawings, and artist books nationally and internationally in galleries and corporate collections. Baker’s animations have received numerous awards including a Pixie, which honors outstanding work in Motion Graphics, Visual Effects and Animation and two International CINDY (Cinema in Industry) awards.  Her work tackles social justice issues such as  domestic violence and sexual assault.  Trina currently Chairs the Animation Department at Lesley Art + Design.

Melchor Quick Hall, PhD is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. Dr. Hall is the author ofNaming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. She is both a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) and is a current 2021-2022 Rodman Rockefeller Centennial Fellowwith the Institute of International Education. She received a 2011-2012 US Student Fulbright research grant to Honduras. Her poem, Framing Reproductive (In)Justice: A Picture Perfect Gruesome Negress Hurt-story, was recently published in MoMA Magazine.

Eric Keller is a veteran CG artist with over 20 years of experience creating models for feature films, episodic TV, scientific visualization, planetarium shows, VR, AR, 3D printing, and jewelry design. He creates training titles for The Gnomon Workshop and has also taught ZBrush and Maya classes at Gnomon School in Hollywood. He has written several top-rated books on both ZBrush and Maya, as well as numerous tutorials and articles for leading industry magazines such as 3D World. He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard Medical School. His credits including 10 Cloverfield Lane, Star Trek: Beyond, Aquaman, Power Rangers, Swamp Thing, and John Wick 3: Parabellum.

Brandeis Student Scholar Partners:

Cyrenity Augustin is a junior majoring in Creative Writing and English with a particular focus on both novel writing and screenwriting. Having been interested in stories since she was a child, her growing awareness of the world around her influenced her writing to not only inspire wonder but to show the intricacies of human nature and properly represent people of color in media. Whether cranking out an essay or developing a fictional world, she puts her heart into her work, all with the goal of making the world a better (and more exciting) place for everyone.

Pilar Duvivier is a junior at Brandeis and an MLK Fellow studying psychology and studio art. The majority of her artwork is primarily made up of figurative works and self-portraiture. Using her preferred medium of paint, she draws inspiration from her passions for social justice, music and art history to create personal narrative pieces. Career wise, she wants to be a working artist, but is also interested in exploring career paths in museum work (curation and restoration), art therapy and psychological research, with a focus on mental illness.

Lesley University Interns:

Paola Almonte Colon is an Animation Alumni of 2022. She started out doing stop motion animation as a basis. She learned 3D Animation back in high school by using Blender and using the internet for resources. Her aim currently is to learn more on professional software like Maya and Z-Brush for 3D animation and modeling, as well as learning to code on the side. She aims to work in a Studio one day. She is currently doing internships, gigs, and personal projects.