Miwa Matreyek

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, director, designer, and performer based in Los Angeles. She has been an internationally touring independent artist since 2010.

Coming from a background in animation by way of collage, Miwa creates live, staged performances where she interacts with her animations as a shadow silhouette at the intersection of cinematic and theatrical, fantastical and tangible, illusionistic and physical. Her work exists in a dreamlike visual space that makes invisible worlds visible, often weaving surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between man and nature. Her work exists both in the realm of the hand-made and tech. She travels as a one-woman show, often incorporating artist talks and workshops.

She performs her interdisciplinary shadow performances all around the world, including animation/film festivals, theater/performance festivals, art museums, science museums, and tech conferences. A few past presenters include TED, MOMA, Lincoln Center, Sundance New Frontier, Future of Storytelling conference, Exploratorium, Adler Planetarium, ISEA conference, Meta.Morph (Norway), Anima Mundi (Brazil), Houston Cinematic Arts Festival, Carnegie Museum of Natural History and many more. She has also performed at many universities, including Texas A&M, Boston University, University of Southern California, University of California-San Diego, University of Michigan, Western Carolina University, University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana, University of Hawaii in Hilo, and more.

She received her Master of Fine Arts for experimental animation and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts in 2007. She is also a co-founder and core collaborator of the multimedia theater company, Cloud Eye Control. She is a recipient of the Sherwood Award (2016), Creative Capital Award (2013), Princess Grace Award (2007), and Princess Grace Foundation’s Special Projects award (2009, 2012, 2019). Cloud Eye Control is a recipient of several awards and grants including MAP fund (2013), the National Theater Project grant by New England Foundation for the Arts (2013), National Performance Network Creation Fund (2008). Her recent work Infinitely Yours won the Golden Nica for Computer Animation at Ars Electronica 2020. She has taken part in residencies at McDowell Colony (2014) and Headlands Center for the Arts (2011).

She has made commissioned performance work (Pop-up magazine), as well as worked as a video designer for the Austin-based theater company Rude Mechs, Norway-based dance company Carte Blanche, and the Vancouver-based Dance company 605 Collective. She also works intermittently as a freelance commercial animator/designer in the motion graphics industry in Los Angeles.