SPECIAL GUESTS
DON HERTZFELDT
Don Hertzfeldt is a two-time Academy Award nominee whose animated films include It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the World of Tomorrow series, ME, The Meaning of Life, On Memory, Billy’s Balloon, and Rejected. His work has screened worldwide, received hundreds of awards, and made a special appearance on The Simpsons in 2014. In 2020, GQ described his work as “simultaneously tragic and hilarious and philosophical and crude and deeply sad and fatalist and yet stubbornly, resolutely hopeful.” The Austrian Film Museum called his films “of a sort that never really existed before.”
His Oscar-nominated short Rejected has been credited with shaping Adult Swim’s humor and influencing a generation of filmmakers. New York Magazine called it a likely origin of what we now know as “internet humor.”
Hertzfeldt spent six years single-handedly animating It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), later named one of the greatest animated films of all time by critics and publications including Time Out, The Film Stage, and Collider. His World of Tomorrow series, which began with an Oscar-nominated short in 2015, has been hailed as a landmark of modern science fiction. His 2024 film ME advanced to the Academy Awards shortlist for Best Animated Short Film, with Polygon naming it one of the year’s best animated films.
CHRIS SULLIVAN
Chris Sullivan was born and raised in the wooded hills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, alongside his ten siblings. The son of Beryl, a British native, and Lawrence, an Irish American, his parents met in England during World War II.
Sullivan lives in Chicago, where he teaches filmmaking and animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have screened at festivals, theaters, and museums around the world, including Tribeca Film Festival, Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
His feature film Consuming Spirits premiered theatrically at New York’s Film Forum in December 2012, where it played for two weeks. His work has received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital grant for his project The Orbit of Minor Satellites.