Accelerate Session: Collaboration and Community
Collaboration and Community in Animation
Thursday 19 June 2025
18:00 – 19:00 UK
In this Accelerate Session, artist Holly Summerson has invited artists who are experimenting with collaborative and collective animated filmmaking to talk about their work.
Collaborative animation can bring together different points of view, play with uncertainty, question traditions, and create exciting, experimental, unconventional films. Working together with people who might not see themselves as ‘professional’ artists, other animators, artists, and friends, our panelists explore ways of animating shared ideas and visions. Thinking about hierarchies, spontaneity, and compromise in contemporary animation, panelists will talk about some of their experiences and projects with a chance for audience questions.
Holly will be talking with Lily Ash Sakula, Réka Bucsi, Isabel Herguera, and Lydia Beilby. Biographies below.
BSL interpretation and closed captions will be provided.
Follow this link to register.
Supported by Arts Council England.
Image: Isabela Herguera, Sultana’s Deam / El sueño de la sultana
Holly Summerson
Specialising in hand drawn and mixed media styles, Holly is an animator, director and writer based in Edinburgh. Her experience includes short films, music videos, projections, interactive designs and community art projects. She is particularly interested in themes of identity, transformation and under-represented perspectives. Holly studied animation at Edinburgh College of Art.
https://www.instagram.com/holly_summerson/
Lydia Beilby
Lydia lives and works in Edinburgh and her practice moves across and between artistic work and academia. Her creative work centers 8mm & 16mm photochemical film making practices, archival ephemera and text, and is driven by the radical possibilities of a small-scale, DIY collaborative practice rooted in eco-consciousness.
The present focus of her work explores the intersections of performance and documentary, and within this she is interested in considerations of the cinematic apparatus and projection medium as both an extension of the body, and as tools of feminist practice. Lydia frequently collaborates on projects with institutions, archives, collectives and communities and is a permanent member of the teaching team on Edinburgh University’s pioneering MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation.
https://www.screenbandita.org/about
Lily Ash Sakula
Lily is a Deptford, London based multi-disciplinary artist working in animation, illustration, movement and sensory experimentation. They make collaborative work that link different generations and communities; creating space for chaotic fertility and collective brilliance. Lily is interested in capturing instances of joy, flashes of excitement and glimpses of practical utopias; creating magical spaces in which social norms can be broken. They seek through their work to be an active practitioner of radical hope. Organisations
they’ve worked with include Camden Art Centre, National Maritime Museum, October Gallery, The Albany, Magic Me, Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, Goldsmiths, GOSH Arts, GALOP, Queer Youth Art Collective, Project Indigo, Foundling Museum, Metro Charity, Ministry of Stories, Bow Arts and Lewisham Council.
https://www.lilyashsakula.com/
Réka Bucsi
Réka is a Hungarian animation filmmaker. She graduated with a Master’s degree in
animation filmmaking from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Her graduation film SYMPHONY NO. 42 was shortlisted for the Oscars in 2014 for Best Animated Short. Her personal films were screened at various film festivals all over the world, including three of them premiering at the Berlinale Shorts Competition (2014, 2016, 2018) and further playing in competition twice at Sundance (2015, 2016), Annecy, AFI Fest, BFI London Film Festival and twice at SXSW (2016, 2018). Réka’s short film LOVE was nominated for Best Short Film at the European Film Awards in 2017. Her film SOLAR WALK won the Audi Short Film Award at the Berlinale 2018, the Grand Prix at Ottawa International Animation Festival 2018, was nominated at the Annie Awards for Best Short Subject 2019 and is now part of The Criterion Channel.
She has served on many international film festival juries, including Berlinale Shorts International, Sarajevo Film Festival and Shanghai International Film Festival. Réka is also a juror for the annual Red Dot Design Award. GLAS Animation Festival, Animateka Festival and London International Animation Festival have screened retrospective programmes of her work.
Réka became a European Film Academy member in 2017 and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2021.
Isabel Herguera
Isabel directed and produced several short films before directing the animated
feature film Sultana’s Dream (2023), which won the Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb 2024 and Best Film in the Contrechamp section at the Annecy Animation Festival 2024. She taught at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, and at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China. Since 2017, she has been a professor of animation at KHM- Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany.
https://en.khm.de/lehrende/id.20826.prof-isabel-herguera/
Upcoming sessions
This is the first of our 2025 sessions, for which we did an open call inviting people to propose ideas. We’re looking forward to working with Dominica Harrison, Kate Jessop, Mary Martins and Carla MacKinnon to put together sessions that will explore…Queer stories, non-fiction, African animation, imagination and empathy.