Anna Benner

Anna Benner is an artist and filmmaker working in animation, drawing and installation. Born in Germany in 1983, she moved to the UK to study Illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Art (2007, first class honours) before completing her Masters in Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford (2010, distinction). In 2014 she returned to Germany and established her studio in Berlin. In 2016 she opened her gallery graumalerei in Berlin which focuses on contemporary illustration and serves as a space for artists to push their medium and explore in a safe and friendly space.
Her main medium of expression is digital hand-drawn rotoscope animation in a process she honed over the last 10 years. In her work she likes to explore human psychology and emotions, sometimes in their broken state such as in Through the Hawthorn (2014) which dealt with schizophrenia, but sometimes as a deep dive into the mundane & everyday like the exploration of sadness as physicality in 100 Tage Regenwetter (2019). Playing with language to twist these subjects into the absurd is a trademark, such as in Goats of Quiet Disappointment (2017), an installation that exteriorised inner voices with a goat sculpture that insults people. Her artwork has been exhibited in Berlin, London and Paris and her animated short films have screened at festivals worldwide. Through the Hawthorn in particular won various prizes, notably the Grand Prix at Stuttgart Trickfilmfestival in 2014. For her film Black&White; (2019), she won Tribeca film institute’s If/Then Pitch at East doc platform in 2018. In 2019 & 2020 she was selected by DIAF as one of three German animation artists to attend Jerzy Kuczia’s animated film development workshop in Lanckorona, Poland. Her latest film All Her Dying Lovers (2020) premiered at HotDocs and was released on the New York Times OpDocs channel.
Anna is currently developing several new projects as well as working on educational and documentary animation projects and teaching animation.