Mar 13, 2026 at 10:00 am – Mar 15, 2026 at 1:30 pm
Animating the Real:
Documentary & the Imagined Image
With Maggie Brennan, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Kathryn Hamilton & Yehui Zhao
Across this 3-day workshop, animator and filmmaker Maggie Brennan will guide us through how animation offers filmmakers a radical tool for expressing our realities. In a sense, animation surpasses the promise of the moving image, allowing us to make visible what isn’t and to render a reality we live and feel but can’t always see. Through its myriad and evolving techniques, it offers us the ability to create unique emotional forms or representations across time and consciousness.
Maggie’s practice is rooted in how an imagined universe can offer new perspectives on reality, and can communicate inner worlds, dynamic emotions and personal truths more faithfully than recordings of the real world. In this workshop, we’ll be diving into the many ways in which animation can be applied to documentary forms to either visualize or disentangle concepts that are often difficult and otherwise impossible to communicate.
Using animation in non-fiction can have poetic, theoretical, ethical and comedic effects on a film, each of which will be explored in the sessions proposed in the workshop. We’ll be tackling questions like: how does a filmmaker determine what should and shouldn’t be portrayed by a recorded image and when is animation an appropriate solution? What are the new technologies available to animators, how are they changing our relationship to animation and what new problems (ethical, artistic etc.) do they bring? What are the limitations of photography and video footage that animation can help surpass? How can someone’s memory or recollections be visually narrativized? How can feelings or sensations be transformed into an image?
Maggie will be joined by a range of experienced filmmakers and animators to help walk participants through these questions and many more. Kathryn Hamilton (a.k.a. sister sylvester) will dig into the ethics and aesthetics of new media and digital animation techniques, taking a critical eye to contemporary scientific innovation and its representation. Yehui Zhao (May The Soil Be Everywhere) will delve into the ways in which animation may assist filmmakers in unraveling the poetic, reaching for representation of ideas that move beyond the literal. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee) will spend a session answering questions on the ethical nuances of animation involved in his creative process. With more visiting artists to be announced soon! Participants will also be encouraged to share their work with Maggie in a session dedicated to constructive feedback and involved discussion.
Seats are limited, so sign up today!
Details
Open to everyone, though the workshop setting is best suited for filmmakers, film producers, journalists, curators and media artists.
Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience and a film project (it would be great if you have a project in progress that you would present to the group during the work-in-progress critique sessions), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample (and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required).
$295 early bird registration ends on January 14, 2026.
$350 regular registration.
The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until January 14. After January 14, the fee is non-refundable.
No animation software is required for participation in this workshop.
In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a BYOL, i.e. bring your own laptop. Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.
To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via card, check, or cash . After the early bird registration deadline of January 14, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Schedule
Friday, March 13th
10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros
10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Maggie Brennan
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Kathryn Hamilton aka sister sylvester
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Maggie additional exercises / discussion
Saturday, March 14th
10:00am – 12:30pm Creative feedback session with Maggie
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Yehui Zhao
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Maggie, additional exercises / discussion
Sunday, March 15th
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies
10:30am – 12:30pm Remote session with Jonas Poher Rasmussen
12:30pm – 1:00pm Wrap up with Maggie
Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:
Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Share / Discussion / Exercise
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Workshop Exercise + Critique
Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator / director / writer / musician / etc. She is the creator of “Agoraphilia,” a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film “Our Bed Is Green,” which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous festivals worldwide. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital, and her comics have appeared in publications like The New Yorker, The Fader, and Inverse. She is currently working on her next animated short, “Venerations,” which has been awarded grants from NYSCA and The Jerome Foundation.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen made his feature debut with the portrait film ‘Noget om Halfdan’ (2006). ‘Searching for Bill’ (2012), a mix of documentary and fiction, won the Nordic Dox Award at CPH:DOX and the international competition at DocAviv. He also directed the documentary ‘What He Did’ (2015), which was nominated for the film critics’ Fipresci award at Thessaloniki Film Festival.
The animated documentary ‘Flee’ (2021) received the Cannes Festival’s Official Selection stamp at its special digital edition in 2020. The film opened at Sundance Film Festival to warm reviews, winning the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, and subsequently received several prominent awards, including for best feature film at Annecy. Other festival heavyweights include Telluride, Toronto, New York and Chicago, as well as awards and nominated at prominent US ceremonies such as the Gotham Awards and the Critics Choice Documentary Awards. More awards include the Nordic Council Film Prize and two awards at the European Film Awards for best documentary and best animation. ‘Flee’ was nominated in three categories for the Oscars 2022: International Feature Film, Feature Documentary and Animated Feature.
Yehui Zhao is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work explores migration, decolonization, heritage, and regeneration. Her work takes root in the feminist legacies of the global south, drawing inspiration from revolutionary history, womanhood and daughtership, and undocumented collective memory. Yehui’s films have been shown at True/False, Dokufest, DOC NYC, UnionDocs, Prismatic Ground, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Asian American International Film Festival, and other programs. Yehui has published paintings, prints, and writing at Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Review and Action, Spectacle. She is a recipient of the IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts grant, and the York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Yehui holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University. Yehui is an Adjunct Professor at Marymount Manhattan College in the Communication and Media Arts Department.
Kathryn Hamilton aka sister sylvester is a multimedia artist. Her most recent works, Constantinopoliad, won the Interactive award at CPH:DOX 2025, and Drinking Brecht, an interactive documentary, premiered at IDFA 2024. Both continue to tour internationally. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad (live), with a score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024. She is a Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and an ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.
