BIO:

Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist. Her works span experimental animation, installation, drawing, printmaking, and collaborative experiments. Those include: spatial collage, printmaking, curatorial projects, full moon artist salons, drawing clubs, sleep concerts in giant wooden fort structures, puppet shows, making clothing and textile designs, renegade fashion shows in the Paris Metro, domestic ‘happenings’, collective skill-sharing and various collaborative projects involving visual music. 

Maya’s hand-crafted animations and collages are inspired by imaginary worlds, memories and the unconscious. Her animations explore a hybrid approach to cut-paper stop-motion, puppetry, hand-drawn, digital animation and installation. Her work has been shown in national and international film festivals, galleries, museums, libraries and DIY venues including: Lincoln Center, MFA Boston, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, REDCAT Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, Animation Block Party, and Boston Center for the Arts, among others.Recent highlights include: acquisitions of her film ANYUKA into the permanent collections of The Jewish Museum in NYC and The Block Museum of Contemporary Art at Northwestern University in Chicago. Other news: a recent Jury Award at the 2024 Woods Hole Film Festival; a broadcast license with PBS and GBH is set to begin in December; and a family art residency in the summer of 2025 at Marble House Project. 

A forthcoming exhibit in the fall of 2025 will happen at the Jewish Museum of NYC. Past shows and projects include: a solo show at Room 68, Provincetown (2023); a solo show at Trustman Gallery at Simmons University (2022), artist workshops at the ICA Boston (2022), and a Yaddo Residency (2019). She was a 2020 City of Boston Artist Fellow, a 2018 WGBH Launchpad Residency, a 2017 Brother Thomas Fellowship Award and the 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Film. She curated the highly regarded group animation show “The Skin has Eyes: Animated Visions” at the Mills Gallery in Boston in 2019. Her work is in the collections of Google, Hotel Studio Allston, Isenberg Projects, and numerous private collections.

Maya is a 2012 MFA graduate in Experimental Animation from CalArts. She first studied animation at Harvard University. Maya is a Colombian/Hungarian first-generation American. Born and raised bilingually in New York City, she is currently based in Boston. She lives with her husband, also an animator, and their child Paloma, and is always working on some kind of experiment. 

Maya is a Faculty member in Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and has taught courses in Animation at the Rhode Island School of Design & Pratt Institute. Maya has given Guest Artist talks and workshops at various Universities and museums including: Kyoto Seika University, College of the Atlantic, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, MICA, UPenn, MassArt, The University of Illinois Chicago, Emerson College, Montserrat College of Art, and the ICA Boston, among others. 

Clients and Collaborators include:

ICA Boston, Google, Samuels & Associates, Emily Fine Art, art_works, Montserrat Gallery, Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, Longstreet Gallery, The Boston Center for the Arts, Topic, Isenberg Projects, Harvard Business Publishing, Huffington Post, VICE, Intel, Children’s Documentary Network, TV on the Radio, Michel Gondry, Aaron Rose, Levi’s, Toyota, among others. 

SAY HELLO: mayaerdelyi@gmail.com

STATEMENT:

I’m a collagist; cutting, sourcing, and colliding memories and imaginary realms into animations and 3-D paper works. My work braids together various animation and visual processes: cut-paper, stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, collage, puppetry, printmaking and experimental direct-on-film techniques within hybrid digital worlds. I often use bold colors, patterns and found paper textures. The final artworks exist as animated films, artifacts, collages and installations. Through my own search for meaning in dreams, memories and the nature of reality, my films, collages and projects aim to create a space of wonder to contemplate life, death & magic.

Some current inspiration for my work includes:

the language of dreams, color theory, vibrational aesthetics, psychology, Pee-Wee’s playhouse, fungi, children’s books, bees, Stuart Davis, Judy Pfaff, sound baths, synesthesia, Japanese ryokans, anything homemade/homespun, Buckminster Fuller, dinner parties (outside!), paper mache masks, shadow puppets, the Japanese concept of ichigo ichie, quilts, and the game ‘write-draw-write.’