Nina Paley

Nina Paley (born May 3, 1968) is an American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, but most of her recent work has been in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.

Paley distributes much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all the original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence.

Paley was born in Urbana, Illinois, the daughter of Jean (Passovoy) and Hiram Paley. Her family was Jewish. Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois and was mayor of Urbana for a term in the early 1970s.

She attended local elementary and high schools, graduating from University High School in 1986. She illustrated a "History of the North Pole" comic in collaboration with University High School history teacher Chris Butler, and attended the University of Illinois, studying art for two years before dropping out. While in college, her comic "Joyride" ran in The Daily Illini newspaper.

In 1988, Paley moved to Santa Cruz, California, and began to write and draw the strip Nina's Adventures. In 1991, she illustrated The Santa Cruz Haggadah and moved to San Francisco.

In 2002, she wrote and directed Fetch!, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed popularity ever since.

Beginning in 2002, Paley focused her work on the controversial subject of population growth. The most notable entry she produced on this subject was The Stork, in which the natural environment is bombed to destruction by storks dropping bundled babies. The film is a compact expression of the conflict between increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. The 3½ minute film was a considerable success at festivals and resulted in an invitation to the Sundance Film Festival.

During this period of this time, Paley also contributed several comic strips for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, of which she is a member and occasional spokesperson. Her work for the group still remains on their official website.

In 2012, Paley posted an animation to Vimeo titled This Land Is Mine depicting the Middle East conflicts over history; it was named a Staff Pick.

Between projects, Paley has worked as a freelance director at Duck Studios in Los Angeles. She has also taught in the Design and Technology section of Parsons, part of The New School.

As of 2018, Paley has created two animated feature films.

Sita Sings the Blues

Play media

Sita Sings the Blues (full film)

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". Paley later added episodes and other material to the work, which is now called Sita Sings the Blues. Many of the episodes appeared in animation festivals. She expanded it into a feature-length treatment of the Ramayana focused on Rama's wife, Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques.

The finished work premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 11, 2008 and had its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 25, 2008. The film was screened at more than 150 film festivals globally and was broadcast on PBS in New York City. For her work on Sita Sings the Blues, Paley was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and garnered more than 35 international awards, including the top award at Annecy in 2008.The New York Times review of Sita described it as "ambitious and visually loaded" and the film was named a NYT Critic's Pick.

Seder-Masochism

In 2011 she began work on a project called Seder-Masochism, an animated film about The Exodus, showing the rise of patriarchy and the fall of goddess worship. Early support was obtained for the project through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. In June 2018, after having worked sporadically on the film for six years, Seder-Masochism premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France. Reviewers compared Paley's style to Monty Python, and praised the film's irreverent humor. In Poland, the film was screened at the ANIMATOR film festival where it was chosen by the audience as the festival's best feature-length animated film.

Prior to the theatrical release of the film, Paley uploaded selected scenes for viewing on YouTube and Vimeo. The scene "This Land Is Mine" was first posted in 2012, and by 2014 had received 10 million views.

Play media

'Copying is Not Theft' by Paley

Because of obstacles in clearing the rights to Hanshaw's recordings for the Sita Sings the Blues, Paley took active part in the free culture movement.

Since 2009 she is an artist-in-residence at the non-profit organization QuestionCopyright.org, which includes running the projects "Minute Memes" and the "Sita Distribution Project". "Minute Memes" is a series of short ("one-minute") video "memes" made by Paley about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom. She wrote and performed the song "Copying Isn't Theft" meant to be freely remixed by other people, with the animated clip issued as Minute Meme #1. Subsequent animations in this series are "All Creative Work Is Derivative", EFF Tribute and "Credit is Due: The Attribution Song". She also wrote "Understanding Free Content", an illustrated guide to the idea of free content.

In 2010 she started a new comic strip Mimi & Eunice, highlighting intellectual property problems and paradoxes.

She has published much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence. The website for Sita Sings the Blues includes a wiki where its fans contributed translated subtitles for the DVD of the film.

Paley won a Public Knowledge IP3 award in 2010 "for her work in intellectual property".

Though of Jewish ancestry, Paley is an atheist as was her father.

Paley is openly childfree.

In 2011, she began making art quilts. The first public exhibition of her quilts was held in June 2013 in central Illinois.

Comic strips

• Nina's Adventures
• Fluff
• the Hots
• Mimi & Eunice