Jim Trainor has been making animated films since he was thirteen, and now he's forty! His favorite animators are Oskar Fischinger, Robert Breer and Lewis Klahr. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and lived in New York City for nineteen years. Now he lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute. He is not a vegetarian and does not believe in astrology. He is left-handed and color-blind. He makes animated films with Sharpie pens and typing paper, the best-known of which are The Fetishist (1997), about a teenage boy's psychological disintegration, The Bats (1998), about a bat living in a cave in Guatemala six hundred years ago, and The Moschops (2000), about a mammal-like reptile of the Permian Era. He has three film projects in the works: a cutout animation about dragonflies, a live action film about zoo monkeys, and an epic line-drawing animation about prehistoric elephants and lizards living on an island in Indonesia, called Gigantic.

jtrain@artic.edu