ABOUT ANNE BEAL

Anne Beal is an award-winning animation filmmaker and multimedia artist whose work merges experimental animation, painting, and sound. Informed by her musical training, she embraces the intuitive elements of cinematic language. Anne roots her animation work in imperfect and unruly mediums, like watercolor and acrylic inks, whose flow cannot be entirely controlled. In both personal and commissioned work, she investigates Play, female empowerment, and mental health. She has created animation for diverse clients, from Harvard Women’s Health to ANTI- Records.

Anne earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she pursued animation, directing, and sound design. She has been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences in support of her current multimedia production. Her work has screened at renowned animation and film festivals including Ottawa, Annecy, London, Chicago International Film Festival, and many more.

Anne taught animation in the Film/Video/New Media/Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2014-2017 and has since been on faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts. She lives and works in NYC where, in addition to making commissioned work and teaching, she collaborates with her husband on the GRAMMY-nominated jazz orchestra and animation project, Tonal Conversations.

ABOUT CHRISTOPHER ZUAR

Christopher Zuar’s music has been performed internationally by the WDR Big Band, Danish Radio Big Band, hr-Bigband, and the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. He has written arrangements for such notable artists as saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Ben Wendel, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and vocalist Theo Bleckmann.

In 2025 Zuar was nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Original Composition for “Communion,” from Exuberance, his second full-length studio album. The 60-minute song cycle features seven interwoven compositions performed by the Christopher Zuar Orchestra and guest soloists. Jazz pianist Fred Hersch describes Exuberance as “…a mature statement by a great composer in his prime, performed by a stellar ensemble with passion and care.”

Zuar is a two-time MacDowell fellow (‘22, ‘17) and a 2018 Corporation of Yaddo Guest. He has garnered numerous awards and commissions, including the 2021 Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize, the 2020 Copland House Residency Award, and the 2020 SCI Jazz Composition Award. Zuar’s debut album, Musings, was released on Sunnyside Records in 2016 and received a spot on DownBeat magazine’s Best Albums of 2016 and runner-up Debut of The Year in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll.

Christopher Zuar is a member of the Jazz Arts faculty at the Manhattan School of Music. He holds a Master of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music and a Bachelor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, both in jazz composition.

ABOUT ITO MEIKYU

Originally a virtual-reality work that premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, Ito Meikyū develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (the Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated, and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs, and calligraphy. Presented at 150 Media Stream in a new adaptation for the media wall as well as in the original VR format.

ABOUT BORIS LABBÉ

Based on his drawing activity, Boris Labbé’s work is characterized by hybridization, combining the use of digital moving image techniques with those specific to animated film. Boris Labbé’s work forms a cinema of multiplicity. Repetition, re-presentation, collages, patterns, metamorphoses, perpetual movement, as well as constant citations of art history, literature and philosophy, have all become essential resources of his audiovisual language.

Trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême, Boris Labbé (1987, FR) quickly exhibited art around the world, whether at contemporary art exhibitions, international film festivals or audiovisual concerts. His latest short film La Chute was selected for the Special Screening at the Critics’ Week of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In 2020 he collaborated with the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and signed the video scenography of the show Swan Lake. His films and video installations have earned him some seventy awards and distinctions around the world, including the Golden Nica Animation at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and the Grand Prix at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. Between 2023 and 2024, he developed and directed two landmark projects: Ito Meikyū, his first virtual reality project (produced by Sacrebleu Productions and Les Films Fauves) and Glass House, a video scenography in collaboration with composer Lucas Fagin (produced by the Ensemble Cairn). In 2024 Ito Meikyū was awarded the Venice Immersive Grand Prize at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

“A Celebration” is a large-format video collage made up of home movies from various family collections held by the Chicago Film Archives. The work is inspired by the overwhelming abundance of celebrations captured on film in the mid-20th Century. While these moving images of “good times past” create a nostalgic feeling in the viewer, this is partly a result of analog film’s economic and practical limitations: people could not record every second of their lives with pictures—often only the best times were filmed. 

In the introduction to her novel Figuring, Maria Popova posits that “History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.” The moving images collaged together into this project are historic, they are what survived, but they are only a small portal into the largely unrecorded lives of the people depicted on screen. With a critical approach to nostalgia, experimental filmmaker Colin Mason has assembled these home movies into a video installation piece that embraces recorded celebrations as an invitation to imagine the unrecorded ellipses between them. What did people want to be remembered for? What didn’t make the cut? Like the home movies themselves, the resulting project falls somewhere between selectivity and banality, an illusionistic highlight reel of people’s everyday lives. 

This project features home movies from the Frank Miyamoto Collection, Ernest F. Ledbetter Collection, Jack Baker Collection, Marquis Ritchey Cring Collection, Don McIlvaine Collection, Glick-Berolzheimer Collection, John Dame Collection, and the Wittman Family Collection.

ARTIST BIO

Colin Mason is an experimental filmmaker and film programmer based in Chicago. As filmmaker, Colin repurposes archival material to explore themes of bodies, queerness, media, and memory. His 2023 collage film, “this land is your land,” won the Best Experimental Film award at the DePaul Premiere Film Festival and played in multiple other film programs. As film programmer, Colin has served on the screening committees of the Chicago International Film Festival, the Onion City Experimental Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He additionally served as President of the Depaul Experimental Film Club for two years and is currently the curatorial assistant at 150 Media Stream.