Biography

Joanna Priestley has directed, animated and produced 36 films, including the award winning animated feature, North of Blue, and Clam Bake, an experimental phone app. She has been called "The queen of independent animation" by Justin Johnson, British Film Institute. Priestley has had retrospectives in 13 countries and ten states in the USA, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art, (New York, NY), British Film Institute, National Film Theater (London, UK), Hiroshima Animation Festival (Hiroshima, Japan), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland), Jenju International Film Festival (Korea) and Masters of Animation (Trivandrum, India). Her films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Harvard Film Archive and Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. Priestley is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a member of the Animation Executive Committee. She annually juries the Oscars, Student Academy Awards and many other film festivals world wide. Priestley was the founding president of ASIFA Northwest and she runs an apprenticeship program at her studio in Portland, Oregon. Her teaching credentials include instructor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, NW Film Center/Portland Art Museum and Volda University College (Høgskulen i Volda, Norway). Priestley attended Rhode Island School of Design and at UC Berkeley, where she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honors. and California Institute of the Arts where she received an MFA Degree and the Louis B. Mayer Award. Priestley is also a medicinal herbalist who loves traveling and spending time in the forest.