Sara Khalili
Instructor, 2D + Experimental Animation
Education:
BA, Visual Communications
MA, Animation
Graduate-Level Diploma in Art Therapy (in progress)
Bio
Sara is an animation artist, storyteller and poet. She holds a BA in Visual Communications and an MA in Animation from Tehran University of Art and is nearing completion of a degree in Art Therapy. She has been a longstanding faculty member in the MA Animation department at Tehran University of Art. Sara has supervised over 70 practical and theoretical animation theses. She has directed short animations, written scripts and contributed to numerous animation projects and workshops.
Research Interests
Sara’s research explores the theory and practice of creative storytelling and narratology, ranging from classical three-act drama to experimental and avant-garde practices, including improvised and spontaneous forms of expression and their therapeutic applications. She has shared research at Society for Animation Studies conferences in Canterbury, Singapore, and Montreal, as well as other international venues. Her topics have included improvisation, experimental animation, drama therapy, short animation, comedy, animation narratology and Aristotelian studies.
Sara has served as an Advisory Board Member for the Bloomsbury Film and Media book series Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers.
An important part of her academic foundation stems from her MA thesis, A Kinetic Study of Single-Shot Animation. She is interested in long-take cinematography and how narrative design, long-take mise-en-scène, and story-world interact with animation and VR, foregrounding their empathetic and sensuous dimensions.
She is nearing completion of a graduate-level degree in Art Therapy at VATI and is actively exploring interdisciplinary intersections across process-based animation, narrative, and art th