Squeaky Wheel’s 23rd Animation Fest!

Friday, December 4, 7 pm ET In-person at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and online In-person is free as part of M&T First Fridays. Online is free or $10 suggested donation Squeaky Wheel is excited to present the 23rd annual Animation Fest! With 11 short animated films from filmmakers and artists from Buffalo and beyond, this year’s edition features work by: anivides (Cristal Buemi and Franci Duran), Heidi Stavrevski, Lysander Wong, Mahda Purmehdi, Martha Griffith, Natalia Ryss, Sanam Sheriff and Sonali Gulati, Scarlet Thibodeau, Suzanne L. Schulz, Tony Nash, and Wendy Cong Zhao To attend in-person: The screening will take place at 7:00 pm at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s auditorium. Just show up! To attend online: Get your ticket below! Upon check-out, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. This year’s Animation Fest was curated by Carra Stratton, Mark Longolucco, Donte McFadden, Dorothea Braemer, and Kalmia Strong. Thank you to our generous sponsors: Daemen University, Buffalo Spree, Tri-Main Center, Council Member Joel Feroleto, West Herr, Harlequin Pet Services, Rich’s, Rigidized Metals Corporation, Hodgson Russ, Stephens & Stephens, Rose Jade Consulting, Marketing Tech, Evolve Fitness, Jody LaFond, Media Production at Buffalo State, Lumpy Buttons, Larkin Development Group, eco_LOGIC studio, Buffalo Toronto Public Media, Anderson’s Frozen Custard And to our generous host: Buffalo AKG Art Museum Biographies of the filmmakers anivides is the interweaving experimental works of multidisciplinary artists Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran focusing on analog and digital frame-by-frame approaches to showcase their abstract, study and practices. Exploring the idea of weight on our structures due to environments, experiences and their direct relations to trauma, healing and transformation. With a focus on collages of bodily works both in human and plant forms from a diasporic immigrant, bipoc, femme, queer and intergenerational perspective. anivides’ recent film diario de verano has screened at Playhouse Cinema and will show at Dawson City Film Fest and Les Sommet Du Cinema D’animation this spring. Heidi Stavrevski is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Buffalo, NY. With her inspiration deeply rooted in nature, she creates vibrant, whimsical work that is both sincere and silly. Some of her most notable works include stories such as Traffic Wizard, and Gleemond. Lysander Wong is an award-winning animation director working predominantly in paper cutout, mixed media, and other stop-motion techniques, aiming to connect the visual and physical to evoke a sense of tangibility and fragility. His films often investigate the ways we see, navigate, and inhabit the world, exploring identity and body through a queer and trans perspective. Mahda Purmehdi (b. 1994, Tehran, Iran) is an experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. He works across the mediums of 16mm, Super 8, and digital video, often integrating original images, words, and sounds with reconfigured literary and audio-visual material. At the heart of his filmmaking practice are questions of modes of film production and the political implications of image-making. His films are characterized as visually tactile and handmade evocations, colliding archive and memory, visible and invisible, the living and ghosts, history (especially film history) and the forgotten. Mahda is pursuing a practice-based PhD as a Presidential Fellow with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He holds a BFA in Film from Tehran University of Art and an MFA in Film from the University of Colorado Boulder. Martha Griffith was born in Toronto, and studied Film Animation in Montreal at Concordia University. Martha currently works with a variety of materials, including: sculpture, mixed media and film animation. Her work has been supported by the National film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Natalia Ryss Creator of animated and experimental shorts. Works as an independent filmmaker and in collaboration with different producers. Prefers non-conventional narration, expressive editing and mixing of art-styles. Participant and awardee of numerous festivals. Was born in Rostov-on-Don. Graduated from Art College and VGIK. Since 2015 lives in Israel. Sonali Gulati is a desi independent filmmaker, a feminist, a queer rights activist, and an educator. They teach film at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. They have an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Gulati grew up in New Delhi and has made several films that have screened at over five hundred film festivals worldwide. Gulati is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, VMFA, CAAM, and several other foundations. Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. Their debut poetry collection HUM ہم won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. Sanam’s work has appeared in POETRY, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Offing, The Adroit Journal, Outlook India, and elsewhere. Sanam holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2022-2025, they served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sanam lives in Philadelphia, where they curate The Poets’ Studio at Twelve Gates Arts. Scarlet Thibodeau is an animator and illustrator based in Massachusetts. She studied at Greenfield Community College, completing her general studies and later transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation. Working primarily digitally, she gravitates toward cheerful color palettes and humorous stories in her animations and illustrations. Suzanne L. Schulz’s videos and essays deal with practices of everyday life, hidden histories of place, solidarities across difference, and gendered labor. Her art is informed by her current work as an educator at Bard Queens and her former life as a scholar, which taught her to grasp new languages, to comb archives, and to read closely. A Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice supported this project. Tony Nash: I was born in Buffalo and worked in different kitchens for about 30 years cooking food for people. Wendy Cong Zhao I am an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. I have been working and teaching in the independent animation field since 2011. I received my BFA in Painting and BS in Film Production from Boston University. I then moved to New York to edit and produce for independent animators Signe Baumane and Bill Plympton. I went back to school in 2018 and completed my MFA at Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts program. My thesis film “A Grieving Heart” premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2025. Banner image: A still from Scarlet Thibodeau’s Jeff and the Moon Have Tea. A frame from a stop-motion animation of two characters sitting across from each other with a table and tea set between them. The first character is a large blue moon and the second one is blue man with a square head and large eyes.