Nicole Antebi, MFA

2025 Early Career Scholar Award

Nicole is an animator and moving image maker. Her interest in animation grew out of a desire to have more tools for storytelling–specifically in thinking about place-based animism and a curiosity about how vastly different cultures/religions historically and presently imbue place with personhood, sympathetic magic, or animistic qualities forming a foundation of knowledge, belief systems, or in times of crisis a desperate incantation of hope.

From a young age, Nicole became acutely aware of the inequities facing Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Fronteriza/o/x/s who reside in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad, Juárez, the region where she came of age. In the years since Nicole graduated from high school in 1993, following the signing of NAFTA, she watched the two cities, that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.

Nicole is an assistant professor of Illustration and Animation at the University of Arizona and has previously taught at CUNY Queens College, SUNY Albany, and in 2019 she was a visiting professor at la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla.