Nina Carolyn Paley
Paley distributes much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all the original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft license.
Since January 2021, Paley runs the gender critical podcast Heterodorx with Corinna Cohn.[ Heterodorx rss feed, anchor.fm.]
Early life
Paley was born in Urbana, Illinois,
the daughter of Jean (Passovoy) and Hiram Paley.
Her family was
American Jewish.
Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois and was mayor of Urbana for a term in the early 1970s.
She attended local elementary and high schools, graduating from University High School in 1986.[" Alumnuts", ninapaley.com, 24 October 2013.] While in college, her comic "Joyride" ran in The Daily Illini newspaper.
Nina's Adventures and other work
In 1988, Paley moved to Santa Cruz, California, and began to write and draw the strip
Nina's Adventures. In 1991, she illustrated
The Santa Cruz Haggadah and moved to San Francisco.
In 2002, she wrote and directed Fetch!, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed popularity ever since.
Beginning in 2002, Paley focused her work on the controversial subject of population growth. The most notable entry she produced on this subject was The Stork, in which the natural environment is bombed to destruction by storks dropping bundled babies. The film is a compact expression of the conflict between the increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. The 3½ minute film was a considerable success at festivals and resulted in an invitation to the Sundance Film Festival.
During this period of this time, Paley also contributed several comic strips for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, of which she is a member and occasional spokesperson.
In 2012, Paley posted an animation to Vimeo titled This Land is Mine depicting the Middle East conflicts over history; it was named a Staff Pick.
Between projects, Paley has worked as a freelance director at Duck Studios in Los Angeles.
Apocalypse Animated
In February 2022, Paley completed her project
Apocalypse Animated, creating nearly 300 animated loops for the Book of Revelation.
Paley also created lenticular cards of 10 selected animations.
[" Category: Apocalypse", ninapaley.com.][" ApocalypseAnimated Lenticular Cards Crowdfunder Video", Nina Paley on YouTube, 31 January 2023.] Paley released Ultra HD (3840 × 2160 pixel) uncompressed Apple ProRes videos of almost 12 minutes of animation under a
CC-BY-SA license and encouraged
remixing of the material, proposing an audio reading of the Book of Revelation and mixing it with the animation.
[" Have At It", ninapaley.com, 25 February 2022.]
Feature films
As of 2018, Paley has created two animated feature films.
Sita Sings the Blues
In 2002, Paley moved to
Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City on business concerning her third comic strip,
The Hots, her husband terminated their marriage. Unable to return to either Trivandrum or San Francisco, she moved to
Brooklyn, New York. Her personal crisis caused her to see more deeply into the
Ramayana, the Indian epic, which she had encountered in India, and motivated her to produce a short animation which combines an episode from the
Ramayana with a
torch song recorded in 1929 by
Annette Hanshaw, "Mean To Me".
Paley later added episodes and other material to the work, which is now called
Sita Sings the Blues. Many of the episodes appeared in animation festivals. She expanded it into a feature-length treatment of the
Ramayana focused on
Rama's wife,
Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques.
The finished work premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 11, 2008
Seder-Masochism
In 2011 she began work on a project called
Seder-Masochism,
an animated film about
The Exodus, showing the rise of patriarchy and the fall of goddess worship. In June 2018, after she had worked sporadically on the film for six years,
Seder-Masochism premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France.
Reviewers compared Paley's style to
Monty Python, and praised the film's irreverent humor.
In Poland, the film was screened at the ANIMATOR film festival where it was chosen by the audience as the festival's best feature-length animated film.
Prior to the theatrical release of the film, Paley uploaded selected scenes for viewing on YouTube and Vimeo. The scene "This Land is Mine" was first posted in 2012, and by 2014 had received 10 million views combined across the two platforms.
Free culture activism
Because of obstacles in
copyright to Hanshaw's recordings for the
Sita Sings the Blues, Paley took active part in the free culture movement.
Since 2009 she is an artist-in-residence at the non-profit organization QuestionCopyright.org,
Subsequent animations in this series are "All Creative Work Is Derivative",
On 9 March 2010, Paley started publishing on her blog a new three-panel comic strip, Mimi & Eunice, highlighting intellectual property problems and paradoxes.
She has published much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence.[See its lists of subtitles and screenings ]
Paley won a Public Knowledge IP3 award in 2010 "for her work in intellectual property".
Views on gender
Paley describes herself as
gender critical and writes often about the topic on her blog and social media.
A showing of
Seder-Masochism in 2019 was protested by trans rights activists in Champaign, Illinois due to her online comments.
She was a signatory to an open letter published by
The Sunday Times defending J. K. Rowling against criticism for transphobia.
In an interview with
Feminist Current, she stated that when referencing transgender people, she does not necessarily use the pronouns that the person uses. She said, "If a man uses 'she' pronouns... I'm adamant that he is free to identify as he wants. But we're also all free to identify things how we perceive them."
Paley is a cohost of the gender critical podcast,
Heterodorx.
Personal life
Though of
Jewish ancestry, Paley is an
atheist as was her father.
In 2011, Paley began making art . The first public exhibition of her quilts was held in June 2013 in central Illinois.
Works
Comics and comic strips
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"Casey Jones" for Grateful Dead Comix (1991)
[" Drivin’ That Train", ninapaley.com, 1 June 2014.]
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Nina's Adventures
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Fluff
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The Hots
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Mimi & Eunice
Filmography
Features
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Sita Sings the Blues (82 min, 2003–2008, 2-D digital animation. Color.)
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Seder-Masochism (2018)
Shorts
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Cancer (1998. Drawing directly on film. 2 minutes. Color. 35mm.)
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Luv Is... (1998. Clay animation. 3.5 minutes. Beta SP / Super-8. Color.)
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I (heart) My Cat (1998. Clay animation. 3 minutes. 16mm. Color.)
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Pandorama (2000. Drawing directly on film. 3 minutes. color. 15perf/70mm - also known as "IMAX")
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Fetch!
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Thank You for Not Breeding
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The Stork
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Goddess of Fertility (2002. 2-D digital animation. 2 minutes. Clay animated on a glass. Color. 35mm.)
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Fertco (2002. 2-D digital animation. 3 minutes. Color. Video.)
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The Wit and Wisdom of Cancer
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On Children, a segment in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (2015. 2-D digital animation. Color.)
Music videos
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Connie Champagne - "Copying Is Not Theft" (2009) Animation, lyrics, and tune by Paley.
[" Copying Is Not Theft (Minute Meme #1)", questioncopyright.org, 15 December 2009.][" Copying Is Not Theft - Official Version", Question Copyright on YouTube, 1 Apr 2010.]
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Todd Michaelsen "All Creative Work Is Derivative" (2010) Using Michaelsen's "Sita's String Theory" and Paley's animations.
[ninapaley " All Creative Work Is Derivative (Minute Meme #2)", questioncopyright.org, 10 February 2010.]
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Evanescent - "Credit Is Due (The Attribution Song)" (2011) Animation, lyrics, and tune by Paley.
[ninapaley. " Credit is Due (The Attribution Song)", questioncopyright.org, 27 June 2011.]
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Intuitive Gym - Her Story. Using Paley's animations.
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Gala - "Parallel Lines" (2021) Animation by Paley.
[" Parallel Lines", ninapaley.com, 15 February 2021.]
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Milton Estes and His Musical Millers - "When the Fire Comes Down" (2022) Animation from Apocalypse Animated
Other works
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Quilts
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"Apocalypse Animated" and lenticular cards of its animations.
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"Agents of H.A.G." Comic Book
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GENDER WARS Cards
["
]
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> GENDER WARS Cards", heterodorx.com.
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"Hundred Dollar Drawings", with instructions limited to two words or less.
[" Hundred Dollar Drawings – now $150" ninapaley.com.]
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MysticSymbolic
[" Category: MysticSymbolic", ninapaley.com.]
Media appearances and talks
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The Tom and Doug Show - Paley has been a regular guest on the nationally syndicated Tom and Doug radio show, a weekly comedy music show on the Pacifica Radio Network.
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Talk "Copyright is Brain Damage" at TEDxMaastricht
[" Copyright is Brain Damage | Nina Paley | TEDxMaastricht", youtube.com.]
External links
