Nicole Antebi

Biography

I am an animator and moving image maker.

My interest in animation grew out of a desire to have more tools for storytelling–specifically in thinking about place-based animism and a curiosity about how vastly different cultures/religions historically and presently imbue place with personhood, sympathetic magic, or animistic qualities forming a foundation of knowledge, belief systems, or in times of crisis a desperate incantation of hope.

From a young age, I became acutely aware of the inequities facing Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Fronteriza/o/x/s who reside in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad, Juárez, the region where I came of age. In the years since I graduated from high school in 1993, following the signing of NAFTA, I watched the two cities, that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.

I am an assistant professor of Illustration and Animation at The University of Arizona and have previously taught at CUNY Queens College, SUNY Albany, and in 2019 I was a visiting professor at la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. 

Degrees

• M.F.A. Visual Art
• California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, United States
• B.F.A. Sculpture/Printmaking
• University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas, United States

Awards

• 2024/2025 Recipient of the Integrative Art Research Fellowship
• University of Arizona, Fall 2024
• Fulbright-García Robles U.S. Studies Chair Finalist
• Fulbright, Fall 2024 (Award Finalist)
• 2024-2025 Herbst Award for Faculty Innovation
• School of ArtThe University of Arizona, Summer 2024
• Anthem Award
• American Museum of Natural History and The City of New York, Winter 2023