Allison Schulnik is a Sky Valley-based interdisciplinary artist who focuses on animation, painting, and pottery.
Allison Schulnik is an artist and animator whose work moves fluidly across different mediums, including stop motion, painting, drawing, and sculpture. She doesn’t treat animation as a separate discipline, but as an extension of her broader art practice.
One of her most iconic films is "Eager", a stop-motion piece made entirely with hand-sculpted clay puppets. The film centers around several faceless, long-haired figures moving through a ritual-like dance. Their movements shift constantly because every frame is handmade. That slight inconsistency creates an uncanny feeling, like the image itself is unstable.
What inspired me most is how Schulnik uses stop motion as a direct emotional language. Clay feels like the perfect material for this kind of work. It’s soft, imperfect, and vulnerable, and you can even see the fingerprintsin every frame. The physical irregularities are what make the emotion feel real. Making her clay figures dance is cute and strange at the same time. Her background as a dancer really carries through to help her animated characters dance in unity.