Sita and Recent Work
In 2002, Paley moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City on business concerning her third comic strip, The Hots, her husband terminated their marriage. Unable to return to either Trivandrum or San Francisco, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Her personal crisis caused her to see more deeply into the Ramayana, the Indian epic, which she had encountered in India, and motivated her to produce a short animation which combines an episode from the Ramayana with a torch song recorded in 1929 by Annette Hanshaw, "Mean To Me".
Since then she has added episodes and other material to the work, which is now called Sita Sings the Blues, thus expanding it into feature-length treatment of the Ramayana focused on Rama's wife, Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques. Many of the episodes have appeared in recent animation festivals. The finished work premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 11, 2008.
She has taught in the Design and Technology section of Parsons, part of The New School.
In 2012 she began work on a project called "Seder Masochism", an unorthodox animated film of The Exodus, narrated by recordings of Passover Seders. Phase I was an experiment with recordings, the funding for it was gathered via Kickstarter service. The real movie will be produced in Phase II.
She also makes some quilts.
Read more about this topic: Nina Paley
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that’s the angels’ pasture; they are happy; they don’t have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)