Thank you for joining us at THE 37TH SOCIETY FOR ANIMATION STUDIES CONFERENCE
From June 15 to 18, the 37th Society for Animation Studies Conference brought scholars, artists, and students to Pittsburgh. Thank you to everyone who presented, attended, volunteered, and supported the event.
photo gallery
presentation resources – coming soon
Keynote speaker
Marge Dean
Marge Dean is an Emmy®-winning producer/executive and current Head of Studio, responsible for the production of original content at Skybound Entertainment, including the hit Amazon Prime series, Invincible. Renowned for her studio and animation pipeline building expertise, Dean (re)designed several studios including Columbia-TriStar TV, Warner Brothers Animation, Mattel’s Playground Production, Omation (Steve Oedekerk), Technicolor Animation and Wildbrain Entertainment. Prior to joining Skybound, Dean supervised the development and production of Crunchyroll Original series as Head of Crunchyroll Studios. In 2014, Dean led a group of women to revitalize the non-profit advocacy group WIA, then known as Women in Animation. Under her leadership, membership grew from 120 to over 4,500 in five years, and reached over 18,000 animation professionals and students. Thanks to Dean and WIA’s volunteers, they’ve launched several community-based initiatives, including the organization’s flagship program, The Mentorship Circle Program, a historic partnership with UNESCO, and the annual WIA World Summit. WIA has grown into a world-class advocacy organization impacting the lives of creative women, transgender people, and non-binary people around the world.
Keynote speaker
Brendan Burch & Wendy Willis
From Screen to Community: Animation and Its Role in the Public Dialogue.
Brendan Burch is an Academy Award–winning, Emmy-nominated producer, animation executive, and nonprofit founder whose work spans television, film, and digital media. He is the founder and CEO of Six Point Harness, an animation studio he launched in 2003 that has produced acclaimed projects for Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, Disney, Fox, Amazon, and Adult Swim. Over the past two decades, Six Point Harness has been behind series and films including Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Guava Island, Atlanta, Apollo Gauntlet, The Boys, and the Academy Award–winning short Hair Love, which won Best Animated Short Film in 2019.
Wendy Willis is a creative producer who has worked in features, television and digital media for over two decades, developing both comedies and dramas alike. Most recently, Wendy was the Executive Producer on the animated series, OMG Yes: A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances for Adult Swim and the animated short, Yoppaman (in development as an animated special), created by Zack Fox and produced in conjunction with GILGA. She served as the Head of Development for the animation studio, Six Point Harness, from 2016-2024 and helped oversee projects such as the Oscar-winning short, Hair Love, and Adult Swim’s Apollo Gauntlet, among others. Prior to Six Point, she was a development executive at Mosaic where she oversaw a slate of projects under their first-look deal at HBO and also spearheaded the company’s first theater project with Crescendo Productions. Earlier in her career, Wendy worked for Lorne Michaels at Saturday Night Live and at Mopo Productions where she helped produce the Oscar-winning short documentary, The Twin Towers. Wendy serves on the board of Now What?! Animation, a nonprofit which aims to demystify policy and politics for young voters through animation.
Keynote speaker
Dr. Tanine Allison
Legacies of Inequity in Motion Capture and Digital Imagemaking
Associate Professor and Arthur Blank NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Animate EXPERIENCE 2026: The 37th Annual Conference
The 37th Society for Animation Studies Conference will take place in the city of Pittsburgh (USA) from June 15 to 18, 2026 (with optional excursions to follow on June 19-20). It will be hosted by the Pennsylvania Expanded Animation Alliance (PA XAA), a consortium of faculty from local universities (including Carnegie Mellon University, Point Park University, Robert Morris University, and the University of Pittsburgh) in concert with the Children’s Museum Pittsburgh. The event will be hybrid, with additional details to follow.
For this year’s conference, we welcome especially proposals that engage with the theme of “The Animate Experience.” While this theme presents many productive interpretations, this conference will attempt to raise questions about animation as a way of processing extreme experiences that lead to such psychological states as affect and trauma. We particularly encourage submissions that explore the potential and limitations of animation as a means of coping with experiences for animation makers and animation audiences and as a vehicle for social emotional learning.
We invite proposals on any animation-related topic but encourage in particular proposals that engage with the theme of the Animate Experience. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Animation and the Anthropocene: Animating environment
- Animation as affective practice: Haptic and/vs digital
- Animation as witnessing: Translating experience through animation
- Mediated empathy: Creating safe distance or bringing closer to the event
- Beyond indexicality: Abstraction and emotion
- Vicarious resilience: Animation as a vehicle for (learning) coping
- Animation and pedagogy: Animation in the classroom
- From screen to community: Animation and its role in the public dialogue
- Representation of experience: Hollywood and/vs independent animation
- Documentary animation: Documenting the undocumentable
Hybrid Participation Options
The Animate Experience conference is designed primarily as an in-person community event, supporting rich exchange, networking, and shared engagement. At the same time, we recognize that not all participants are able to travel to Pittsburgh at this time. To ensure broad and equitable access, the conference will offer curated virtual participation options for participants who have an approved reason.
Virtual participation may be requested in cases of demonstrated need, including but not limited to:
- Travel restrictions
- Risk of persecution
- Health, mobility, caregiving or accessibility considerations
- Institutional or logistical barriers
- Financial hardship will be considered but please do apply to the Emru Townsend Award (the Society for Animation Studies’ dedicated travel assistance grant) first.
Requests will be subject to blind-review following acceptance of all submissions to ensure fairness and to maintain the integrity of the conference experience.
Event Sponsors
Animate EXPERIENCE 2026: The 37th Annual Conference
Find venue locations, contact numbers, and emails here for seamless coordination.