Awards
Jury
Our 2026 jurors are Pacific Northwest-based animators who will judge all shorts in competition for the Grand Jury Prize, Best in the Pacific Northwest, and Best Student Film awards.
Audience members will also vote on their favorite short to win the Audience Award.
Alex Barsky is an artist living in Seattle, WA. Her award-winning short films The Alligator and Train Man are about frustrated and weary people who have run out of luck. They have screened around the world at festivals like SXSW, Animex, and Animation Block Party. She runs Zine Hug, a micropress that publishes comics and animation using a risograph printer. She is currently an assistant professor at Cornish College of the Arts and the director of their animation program.
Michael Granberry
Michael Granberry is a three-time Emmy award-winning director and stop-motion animator whose work can be seen in Ben Stiller’s critically acclaimed Severance, Guillermo del Toro's Oscar-winning Pinocchio, Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild, Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Anomalisa, the multiple-award-winning Tiny Chef Show and numerous others. His Oscar- qualifying short film, Les Bêtes, screened at the 2025 Sea Slug Animation Festival and has won over 100 awards worldwide, including the Jury Prize at the 2025 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
Michael Granberry is a three-time Emmy award-winning director and stop-motion animator whose work can be seen in Ben Stiller’s critically acclaimed Severance, Guillermo del Toro's Oscar-winning Pinocchio, Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild, Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Anomalisa, the multiple-award-winning Tiny Chef Show and numerous others. His Oscar- qualifying short film, Les Bêtes, screened at the 2025 Sea Slug Animation Festival and has won over 100 awards worldwide, including the Jury Prize at the 2025 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
Clyde Petersen
Clyde Petersen (they/he) is a transgender Northwest artist, working in film, animation, music and installation. He re-creates lost worlds and documents cultures largely erased by AIDS, capitalism and gentrification. He works to offer alternate, more equitable realities and futures through the reexamination of overlooked histories. His work is slow and patient, animating only a few seconds of film a day, gathering new oral histories and building scale-model worlds to tell stories in. Clyde is the director of Torrey Pines, Even Hell has its Heroes, and Our Forbidden Country.
Clyde Petersen (they/he) is a transgender Northwest artist, working in film, animation, music and installation. He re-creates lost worlds and documents cultures largely erased by AIDS, capitalism and gentrification. He works to offer alternate, more equitable realities and futures through the reexamination of overlooked histories. His work is slow and patient, animating only a few seconds of film a day, gathering new oral histories and building scale-model worlds to tell stories in. Clyde is the director of Torrey Pines, Even Hell has its Heroes, and Our Forbidden Country.
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