Animation Festival Oct. 18 at Northern Vermont University

The fifth annual Vermont Animation Festival will include workshops and screenings Oct. 18 at Northern Vermont University’s Lyndon campus. 
 
The festival, the only such event in Vermont, is a collaboration between NVU and St. Johnsbury-based Catamount Arts and is free for the public.
 
The festival features a presentation at 7 p.m. at NVU’s Alexander Twilight Theatre by animator Dean Kalman Lennert, who will show work from his upcoming independent short film “Dear Anna Olson.”
 
Lennert teaches at the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He was an animator on Blue Sky Studios’ 1998 Oscar-winning short film “Bunny” and 2002 Oscar-nominated feature “Ice Age. He has contributed animation to shows and segments on the Nickelodeon Group’s Nick Jr. channel, “Sesame Street” and “Saturday Night Live,” among others.
 
Festival events in Room 131 at NVU’s Harvey Academic Center include:
•         1 p.m., hand-drawn film workshop with NVU assistant professor and animation festival founder Robby Gilbert
•         5:30 p.m., stop-motion workshop with NVU animation and illustration student Electra Poulsen
 
NVU-Lyndon’s animation and illustration Bachelor of Fine Arts program, with a new concentration in game design, is one of few animation programs in Vermont. Gilbert recently presented animation research to an international gathering of scholars at the Society for Animation Studies conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
 
For more information, visit VermontAnimation.org or email emp12280@nvu.vsc.edu. 
 
The festival is part of Northern Vermont University’s Lecture and Arts Series, made possible in part by the Harriett M. Sherman Lecture Fund, the Lecture and Arts Endowment, Maret ’92 and Tad ’89 Asaro, Bourne’s Energy and Donald P. Blake Jr. Inc.