www.coa.edu/html/acnancyandrews.htm
www.nancyandrews.net/

Nancy Andrews, faculty member in video and performance art at College of the Atlantic, has been awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. According to the announcement, issued this week, these fellowships are "appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment."

An artist who combines drawn animation, puppetry, collage and live action in her filmmaking, Andrews creates scenarios that are just the other side of plausible. She has recently completed her Ima Plume Trilogy, a series following the "chalk talk artist" Ima Plume through encounters with the unknown.

The fellowship will allow Andrews the time and funds to complete her next movie, On a Phantom Limb, an autobiographical fictional piece about a cyborg superhero. She offered a flavor of the film in her application to the foundation: "I have told you about the birds, the cyborgs, and the drawings and objects we found, but I have not told you of the awfulness, the smell, the monstrous wind, the lacerations, and what lies beyond," she wrote. "The operations were difficult, but successful. However, the results were unintended. I have a woman's body, and the head of a bird. I have wings."

Andrews, is one of just 190 individuals to receive the fellowship in 2008, chosen from more than 2,600 applicants. Her films, she says, "are reflections on contemporary culture, history, philosophy and the self." At root, however, "they are personal films about life and death and mystery." Comments David Hales, president of College of the Atlantic, "It would be impossible for any of the fellows to exemplify the criteria of stellar achievement and exceptional promise more than Nancy."

When Andrews has finished a film, it generally finds a New York premier at the Museum of Modern Art. According to the MoMA's film curator, Laurence Kardish, "Nancy Andrews' art remains artisinal and unique in an age of computers. She fashions handcrafted films mixing puppet animation and live action. Her works are at times playful, at times melancholic, but always original and mysterious." 

What is most exciting, says Andrews, "is being able to have more concentrated time to work-and also being able to expand the possibilities of the film, rather than narrowing them due to financial reasons."

Andrews' work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Flaherty Seminar among other venues in the United States, as well as in festivals in Israel, Belgium, and Taiwan. This work is in the film collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the LEF New England Moving Image Fund, Illinois State Arts Council, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (supported by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts), and National Endowment for the Arts. Andrews received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1983.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals. Among the fellows are Nobel, Pulitzer and other prize winners, including Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.