Janeann Dill: IIACI

For Janeann Dill, a personally defining moment took place in 1990 when she was an Artist-in-Residence at the American Center in Paris:

"I was walking from the Pompidou Center to Les Halles and feeling a great sense of personal loss because of the recent death of my mother. Peter Greenaway dubbed this my 'Road to Damascus' experience. On the plaza of the Fountain des Innocents (a monument to mothers and children killed in the French revolution), I imagined what only could be called a ‘vision’ for my paintings. In that moment, my mind’s eye saw my paintings move in time and imagined what I saw was called ‘animation'."

Thus for more than thirty years, Janeann Dill’s work has been a productive investigation of the intersections of painting, film, animation, and critical discourse. She received her B.A. (in painting/drawing/printmaking) and M.A. (in painting and drawing) from the George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Dill earned her M.F.A.in 1994 from the Experimental Animation Department at California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in the School of Film and Video where Jules Engel and William Moritz served as her mentors. A filmmaker, scholar, and artist, Janeann Dill earned her Ph.D. in 2006 in Media Philosophy from the Swiss-German institutional brainchild of philosophers Jean-Francois Lyotard and Wolfgang Schirmacher. (The Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinare Studien was approved and accredited just months before Lyotard’s death in 1998 and opened its doors in 1999.) Stemming from her work at CalArts and her interdisciplinary Ph.D. research, Dill is currently revising for publication two forthcoming books, Thought and Timing: Philosophy of Experimental Animation and Jules Engel: A Biography. The work on Jules Engel will be the official biography of a seminal figure in contemporary animation. Thought and Timing promises to provide a ground-breaking historical and theoretical understanding of the context and nature of experimental animation. An additional manifestation of her productive fusion of artistic and critical activity is her recently founded online think tank, IIACI: Institute for Interdisciplinary Art and Creative Intelligence (see interdisciplinaryartinstitute.com).

Dill’s most recent ambitious collaborative project, “MAH: Moving Around Heidegger,” a multi-screen video installation (directed by Dill and a collaborative project with poet Hank Lazer (Pultizer nominee) is a dome animation project that immerses the viewer in a world of time and movement; an early stage of the larger project, “MAH: Meditate,” was selected by curator Judith Nothnagel for showing in GlobalScreen and is touring Europe and Asia 2009-2010 for exhibition in several museum sites in Germany, Senegal, Greece, Sarajevo, Italy, South Africa, and Malaysia.

Janeann Dill’s distinguished career as a painter and filmmaker is reflected by her many grants: an Ahmanson Foundation grant, an Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Artist grant, a James Irvine Foundation grant, a Mary Lou Boone grant for Performance in Experimental Animation and Choreography, and three regional Artist-in-the-School residency grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Janeann Dill’s film “Paris is a Woman” has been nationally and internationally selected by curators to screen in venues as varied as Miami’s Bass Museum of Art to international film festivals in which she has received awards for Best Experimental Short Film and Best Directorial Debut for a Short Film. Dill’s creative practice and critical scholarship were showcased at the American Film Institute, Silver Screen Theater, Maryland in 2004 (Gabe Waddell, Curator). Her fine art is in numerous art museums and private collections, including collections at Vanderbilt University, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Landmark Center (Life and Casualty Corporate Headquarters in Nashville), the American Embassy in Paris, and the Hauppage Corporate Center (which awarded Dill a $24,000 commission for a monumental painting). Selected to represent the American Embassy in Paris at the Festival Internationale des Peintures de Cagnes sur Mer, Dill won a Prix D’Or (selected from numerous entrants representing over twenty countries) for her monumental painting (6’ X 18’) “The Night the Moon Touched the Earth.”

Janeann Dill has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences. In 2009, she was Chair of the College Art Association panel “Thinking Experimental Animation BEFORE William Kentridge: An Art Historical U-Turn.” She was one of three keynote speakers for the 2006 Danish Animation Studies Conference directed by Samuel ben Israel held at the University of Copenhagen’s Film and Cognition Department where Dill spoke on “Philosophy of Experimental Animation: The Question of Cinema in a Fine Art Discipline.” Her article “Jules Engel: Film Artist, A Painterly Aesthetic” was nominated by the National Film Board of Canada and Society for Animation Studies for the Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert Award for Best Scholarly Article on Animation. Harvard University Film Archive subsequently reprinted this article in 2000 as part of a retrospective of Engel’s work. Dill is Jules Engel’s official biographer, and she has received a research grant from the iotaCenter to author a historical first Artist’s Monograph on Jules Engel.

In addition to her two-year residency as a fine artist/painter at the American Center in Paris, in 2003 Dill was awarded an artist’s studio/loft in Baltimore as an Artist-Filmmaker in Residence at The Patterson Theater, Creative Alliance. Dill’s national and international recognition as a scholar and artist is reflected in numerous invitations to serve as a panelist and referee. Dill has served the U.S. Department of Education as referee in Studio Arts for MFA grants for the Jacob K. Javits Program, for Funds for Improving Post Secondary Education (FIPSE: Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, Film and Media Studies). She has served on the SIGGRAPH grand jury for the 2008 Art Gallery Exhibition and as an online Juror for the SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery Exhibition. Dill is a member of the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association of California Institute of the Arts and is on the Advisory Board for the Julia Spears Foundation.

Over the past ten years, Janeann Dill has taught at the Los Angeles Art Institute, L.A. Mission College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Stevenson University, and the University of Alabama. At the University of Alabama’s New College, Dill developed courses in experimental animation, creativity, a seminar in Time, Image, and Sound, and an introductory fine arts course. Her teaching embodies her wide range of interdisciplinary and collaborative arts activities. A demanding and inspiring professor, Janeann Dill’s most recent group of students have earned internships at the American Pavilion at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals, received major university-wide awards, made frequent conference presentations, and gained admission to graduate programs at Cambridge (U.K.), Yale, USC, RIT, and CalArts