About Me

Contact Info: annie@anniepoon.com, 631-721-5937, 433 W. 34th St. New York, NY 10001

Hi Friends!

My work has shown in many wonderful venues including,

The National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, BAM, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Also you can see my videos in film festivals from the Chicago International Children’s Film festival and San Francisco International Children’s Film Festival to Nickelodeon and PBS.

Just to save you some searching in the video section, my best loved films include ‘Runaway Bathtub’, ‘Christmas Tree’, and ‘The Book of Visions’, which was chosen by Mormon Arts and Letters as the Film of the Year.

Photo by Kah Poon, styling by Fred Flare.

I would like to especially thank Lisa King of the KidsFilmFest for being a guide and mentor to me, highlighting me in their programming and developing wonderful kids programs  in the New York area and beyond.

Also I must mention Keith Carollo my constant inspiration at fredflare.com who hosted my comic ‘Puppy Tails’ for two years, some of those comics can be seen on this site.  I love you Puppy!!!!

Bio:

I am a stop motion animator, sculptor, and cartoonist working in the city of my dreams, New York City!  Most of what I do is somehow inspired by the idyllic childhood my parents took care to craft for me.  Sort of a sagging refinement. (I am not able to carry off proper refinement so things are a bit dingy and wobbly).  When I was a child, my mom encouraged me and my six sisters in the arts of cross-stitch, toll painting, piano, baking, and art history.  Instead of allowance I remember getting paid handsomely for learning to play Mozart’s airs, and receiving nickels at the Metropolitan Museum for correctly guessing painter’s names.  We also had plenty of unsupervised fun and no TV was allowed!  Mom said the TV didn’t work because it was struck by lightning.  Years later a sibling revealed the secret to making it work: “plug it in”.  My room was in the basement and I built a drawing table out of scraps of wood from the tool area.  I set it up by the boiler tank and spent hours making up characters.  My friend Cathy dreamed of using me as a stepping stone to fame.  She proposed to be my agent marketing my cartoon character, ‘Togby’.  Catherine Tyc, if you are reading this, he was copied from a book!!! Sorry about that, but in more recent news my ‘Puppy’ character is original.

Adulthood inevitably came round. I attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.  I dropped painting studies in the last semester of the last year.  My husband had complained that the paintings were ‘stiff’. He asked if there was something from childhood I could use to inspire me and bring out my playful personality.  Paper had been my favorite toy.  So I ressurrected an unfinished theatre production of ‘The Roly Poly Pudding’ originally staged in my playhouse window.  Instead of puppets on straws, this time I made a truly disconcerting black and white film.  It was a hit!  It was stop motion!  I went on to make almost 20 more that showed to happy children in film festivals around the U.S.

I recently completed a super fun series of sculptures about my mom and her ‘fancy’ influence on the Benac family.  They are made of truly humble materials (foam core, sharpies, thread and superglue).  Inspiration for individual items comes from Sotheby’s auction catalogs, the Gilded Age, and mom’s home furnishings.

Right now I am working on a series of colorful cuckoo clock paintings, inspired by a broken clock I found at a tag sale.