Briana Yarhouse

About Briana

Briana Yarhouse is an animator, researcher, and Director of Animation for Interlochen Center for the Arts. Her animation has played in many festivals, most notably the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, for which “Beyond Freedom,” a short she acted as animator on, was nominated for best short of the year. In 2013 her short film “The Box” was selected as part of the Best Animation from ASIFA at the Canlandiranlar Animators Festival in Istanbul, Turkey. She has juried animation for the Woods Hole Film Festival and the Xiamen International Animation Festival.

Her teaching experience includes 15 years as professor of Digital Art and Design and the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies program at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Her essays and papers have been published in the ASIFA Magazine, The International Journal of Comic Art, and Society for Animation Studies Journal, among others. She has spoken on animation and sequential art at conferences around the world, most recently in 2021 at Annecy Animation Festival.

She is the director of International Animation Day for the Association Internationale du Film d’Animation coordinating showings around the globe. In 2020 she worked to coordinate animators all around the planet to create a collective animation called Spiritus Mundi: Animating the World. Her most recent work can be seen at yarhouse.com.

Creativity starts with making yourself an interesting place for ideas to land like birds or insects (thanks Tom Waits). I encourage my students to have the freedom to play and explore as it is the pathway toward creating magic with animation.