About Dr. Dill

An interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker (Producer, Director, Writer) and scholar, Janeann Dill was conferred a D.Phil in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought from the Swiss-German institutional brainchild of philosophers Jean-Francois Lyotard and Wolfgang Schirmacher. The Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinare Studien (European Graduate School) was approved and accredited just months before Lyotard died in 1998 and opened its doors in 1999. Presently in revision of a forthcoming book, Thought and Timing, Philosophy of Experimental Animation, Dill earned her M.F.A. from the Experimental Animation Department at California Institute of the Arts in the School of Film and Video where Jules Engel and Dr. William Moritz served as her Mentors. Dill was awarded an Exchange Fellowship with the L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs for a research residency in Paris to shoot her thesis film. Her M.A. and B.A. are from Vanderbilt University in the studio arts: Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking. Awarded an Ahmanson Foundation Grant, an Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Grant, a James Irvine Foundation Grant, a Mary Lou Boone Grant for Performance in Experimental Animation and Choreography, and three regional Artist-In-the-Schools Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Janeann Dill's film, Paris Is A Woman has been curated world-wide to screen in venues as varied as the Wolfsonian Art Museum to international film festivals and received "Best Experimental Short Film" and "Best Directorial Debut in Short Film Category" awards. Dill's creative practice and critical scholarship were showcased at the American Film Institute, Silver Screen Theater, Maryland in 2004, Gabe Wardell, Curator. Dill's fine art has been exhibited widely and is in museums and private collections world-wide. Selected to represent the American Embassy in Paris at the Festival Internationale des Peintures de Cagnes sur Mer, she won a PRIX D'OR from a jury of European curators for a monumental painting-poem (6' X 18'). The PRIX awarded a Retrospective Exhibition of her paintings at the Museé de Cagnes sur Mer for which a choreogapher from the Ivory Coast performed with her round, double-sided dance-drum-poem-painting, "Day and Night, Night and Day Are the Same." In addition to her two-year residency at the American Center In Paris, Dill was awarded an artist’s studio/loft in Baltimore in 2003 as an Artist In Residence for the Creative Alliance at the Patterson Theater. Dr. Dill also serves the U.S. Department of Education as a referee in Studio Arts for academic grants for the Jacob K. Javits Program, and Funds for Improving Post Secondary Education (FIPSE: Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, Film and Media Studies). Serving on the Onsite Jury for SIGGRAPH 2008 Art Gallery Exhibition, "Slow Art" (Lina Yamaguchi, Curator, Stanford University), Dr. Dill also served on the Online Jury for the SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery Exhibition, "Global Eyes" (Vibeke Soresen, Curator, University at Buffalo). Dr. Dill has presented papers in numerous national and international conferences, most recently as one of three keynote speakers for the Danish Animation Studies Conference directed by Samuel Ben Israel. D'ANIMA convened at the University of Copenhagen's Film and Cognition Department where she presented her paper: "Philosophy of Experimental Animation: The Question of Cinema in a Fine Art Discipline." Focusing on the interdisciplinary art of contemporary experimental animation, “Jules Engel: Film Artist, A Painterly Aesthetic" is a peer-reviewed article published in Animation Journal (Maureen Furniss, Editor-Publisher) that was acknowledged in 1994 by the National Film Board of Canada and Society for Animation Studies as a nominee for the Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert Award for “Best Scholarly Article on Animation.” Harvard University Film Archive subsequently reprinted this article in 2000 as program notes for a retrospective exhibition of Jules Engel’s work. In 1998, Dill was nominated by Dr. William Moritz to be the official Jules Engel Biographer and, subsequently, received a Research Grant from the iotaCenter to author an historically first Artist's Monograph on Engel that is housed in iota's study center, Los Angeles. Numerous other writings in featured animation journals include: "SIGGRAPH: Immersed in Domes, Falling Bodies and Stereo Vision: Where's the Gravity?" and "Marcy Page: National Film Board of Canada's Paradise Found," fps magazine, Emru Townsend, Editor-Publisher, Canada.