Joanna Priestley

Priestley has received fellowships from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts (USA), American Film Institute (USA), Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Millay Colony (USA), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Canada) and the Caldera Arts Foundation (USA). She was awarded the 2007-08 Media Arts Fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and her films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Academy Film Archive and the Library of Congress.

Priestley's influences include Hilma af Klint, Mary Ellen Bute, David Hockney, Jane Aaron, Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Jules Engel. She has taught animation, portfolio design and cinema history at the Northwest Film Center/Portland Art Museum, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Art Institute of Portland and Volda University College (Volda Norway) as well as teaching animation workshops throughout the US and in Canada, Germany and Norway. She is an active proponent of animation as an art form and has worked throughout her career to improve the status and exposure of animation in academia, museums, galleries and the media worldwide. Priestley has presented two papers at the Society for Animation Studies Conference, including "Creating a Healing Mythology: The Art of Faith Hubley" in 1992, which was published in the Spring 1994 issue of Animation Journal.

Priestley has been an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992. She has served on the board of the Regional Arts and Culture Council and been a member of the Public Art Committee in Portland, Oregon.

Priestley received a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, where she received the Louis B. Mayer Award. For two years she was the teaching assistant for famed abstract animator Jules Engel. Priestley made the first computer animated film at Cal Arts, Jade Leaf (1985), using the Cubicomp, early animation hardware that was purchased by Cal Arts in the fall of 1984. Priestley and Engel co-directed Times Square (1986), also using the Cubicomp to generate images and recording them on a 16mm Bolex camera on a tripod, positioned in front of the monitor.

In 1985 she founded her own company, Priestley Motion Pictures, where she has directed, produced and animated 29 short films and Clam Bake (2014), an iOS app. Animated Women: Joanna Priestley, a short documentary with three of Priestley's films, was broadcast on PBS and BBC2 in 1995–96. Priestley has directed animation segments for Sesame Street ("“The Lumps: Rejection Victories” and “The Lumps: Social Skills”, 1990), and directed and animated music video sequences for Tears for Fears (“Sowing the Seeds of Love”, 1988) and Joni Mitchell (“Good Friends”, 1985) and a PBS series title: “Making Peace” (1996). After directing and producing short films from 1979 to 2015, Priestley made an abstract feature film, North of Blue, which premiered at the Annecy International Animation Festival in France in June, 2018.

In 1977, Priestley co-founded and co-directed (with Martha Kelley) Strictly Cinema in Bend, Oregon. They presented film festivals in Bend and weekly film screenings at Bend and Redmond High Schools. She became the regional coordinator, editor of The Animator and coordinator of the Northwest Film and Video Festival at the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum from 1978 to 1983. Gene Youngblood, one of the jurors of the Northwest Film and Video Festival, encouraged her to apply to Cal Arts, which she did in 1983. In 1988, Priestley founded ASIFA-Northwest with Marilyn Zornado. This ASIFA chapter included the northwest region of the United States which comprised Portland, Seattle, Vancouver B.C., and the areas in between. Priestley was president of ASIFA-NW for four years. The organization is now known as ASIFA-Portland.

Joanna Priestley (born November 25, 1950) is a contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.