Sara Khalili
Instructor, 2D + Experimental Animation
Education:
BA, Visual Communications
MA, Animation
Graduate-Level Diploma in Art Therapy
Bio
Sara is an animation artist, storyteller, poet, and art therapist. She holds a BA in Visual Communications and an MA in Animation from Tehran University of Art, and a Graduate-Level Diploma in Art Therapy from the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. She has been a longstanding faculty member in the MA Animation program at Tehran University of Art. Sara has supervised more than 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 her research at Society for Animation Studies conferences in Canterbury, Singapore, Montreal, and Pittsburgh, as well as at 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, foregrounding their empathetic and sensuous dimensions. As an art therapist, she is actively exploring interdisciplinary connections among process-based animation, narrative, and therapeutic approaches.
