We are pleased to announce the first round of special guests for GLAS 2019. Stay tuned for more guests who will be announced in the coming weeks. Julia Pott Julia Pott is a British animator and illustrator living in Los Angeles. Her award winning short films have played at festivals including Sundance, TIFF, Annecy and SXSW. She was named one of the ‘25 New Faces of Film’ by Filmmaker Magazine and ‘Ten Animators to Watch’ by Variety. She has created commissioned work for companies such as Toyota, MTV, Hermes, Oreo, Rachel Antonoff and Bat for Lashes and worked as a staff writer on ‘Adventure Time’ for seasons nine and ten. She is currently working on her own series for Cartoon Network called ‘Summer Camp Island’. Koji Yamamura Koji Yamamura was born in 1964. During the 1990s, He refined his style, spending much of his time making films for children. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short, “Mt. Head”(2002) marked a turning point, he to a place among the world’ s top animation filmmakers by “The Old Crocodile” (2005), “Franz Kafka’ s A Country Doctor” (2007) and “Muybridge’s Strings”(2011). Those films got awarded more than 90 prizes include the grand prizes of 4th big animation festival, Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa and Hiroshima.He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a professor of Tokyo University of the Arts. Dennis Tupicoff Dennis has made many films as writer, director, producer, and designer/animator. These have been both fictional and documentary, animated and live-action, comedy and drama, and often inventive combinations. His films have screened widely on television and at film festivals, and have won numerous awards. They are often shown in retrospectives, and are discussed in many books on animation and documentary. Dennis has spoken at many international conferences, and has taught, presented his work and run workshops at many universities and film schools around the world. Since 2000, Dennis and Fiona Cochrane have worked together on various projects as Jungle Pictures Pty Ltd. Christy Karacas Christy Karacas is an American musician, animator, voice actor, director and writer, known for creating Superjail! and Ballmastrz: 9009 for Adult Swim.         Jim Trainor Jim Trainor (b. 1961) has been making animated films since he was thirteen. His medium is black magic marker on typing paper. He grew up in Washington DC and lived in New York City in his 20s and 30s. His films include The Fetishist, The Bats, The Moschops, The Magic Kingdom, and Harmony. In 2000 Mr. Trainor began teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His film The Presentation Theme (2008) is about life in an oppressive prehistoric culture. In 2016 he completed The Pink Egg, a live-action dramatic movie, his first, based on the lives of parasitic wasps. His wife is musician Caroline Nutley, and they have a little boy, Charlie, six.   Michele Cournoyer Born in Québec in 1943, Michèle Cournoyer studied piano, fine arts, graphic arts, photography and animation film in Québec, England and Italy. She worked as an artistic director, screenwriter and costume designer on some Quebec ground-breaking films, including Mireille Dansereau’s La vie rêvée (1972) and Gilles Carles’ La mort d’un bûcheron (1973). She made six independent experimental films inspired by Dadaism. In 1989, she won the 9th Cinéaste recherché(e) competition held by the NFB’s French Program’s Animation and Youth Studio, which led to A Feather Tale.The first four films she made for the Board garnered a total of 27 international awards and many selections in the most prestigious festivals. Her powerful yet sensitive style, based on metamorphosis, was honed over this period. For her film The Hat (1999), she abandoned the computer rotoscoping technique of tracing over motion picture footage in favor of raw, pure ink-on-paper drawings. Robes of war and Accordion were made in a similar fashion.  She left the NFB in 2009. Her latest film, Soif (2015), is co-produced by the independent studio Unité centrale and the NFB. In 2017 she won the Governor General Award in visual and media arts and the Albert-Tessier Award for her career in film. Kim Laughton Kim is a freelance 3D generalist based in Shanghai. He has recently worked on realtime animations to accompany club events as well as interior design and clothing.       Marc James Roels Marc James Roels is a live-action director, making award winning shorts ‘Mompelaar’ in 2007 and ‘A Gentle Creature’ in 2010. Emma De Swaef specializes in stop-motion and doll-making, her preferred working materials include wool, felt and textile. Together they made the short film ‘Oh Willy…’ in 2012, a stop-motion short that won 80 international awards including the Cartoon d’Or for best European short, and a Cézar nomination. They are based in Antwerp, Belgium and ‘Ce Magnifique Gâteau !’ is their latest production.   Luce Grosjean In 2014 Luce Grosjean founded Sève Films, a distribution company destined to promote student films in animation festivals, but also young talent directors. In 2017, she associated with Miyu Productions to create Miyu Distribution, specialized in distribution in festivals and international sells. 2018 was a great year for the company. The films that she distributed are ‘Negative Space’ and ‘Garden Party’ (Oscar nominated), ‘Bloeistraat 11’ (Annecy Cristal winner), and ‘I’m Going Out For Cigarettes’ (Locarno winner).     Meghan Oretsky Before joining Vimeo in 2014, Meghan could be found cheering on filmmakers in the comments section of countless videos on their site. Today she serves as a member of their curation team, watching thousands of videos a year. She is especially proud to support women in film via her channel “Ladies With Lenses” and through a monthly screening series in NYC.     Irene Kotlarz Irene Kotlarz is an animation curator, producer, and former festival director. She was Founding Director of Platform International Animation Festival, and before that was Director of Cardiff International Animation Festival in the UK. She has curated and produced programs on animation for Channel 4, the BBC and MTV, and most recently was Animation Producer on the Annie and Emmy Award winning He Named Me Malala. She currently teaches at Cal Arts.