Sam Gurry is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, curator, and educator whose work foregrounds the raw, the tactile, and the fevered in animation and moving image.

Gurry’s work, which blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, has screened internationally at festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, IFFR, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival amongst others. Gurry was awarded a 2024 ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Educators Forum grant to support the creation of their next film, furthering their research into animation’s relationship to memory, decay, and the physicality of the image.

As the founder of Animation Brüt, Gurry champions experimental and non narrative animation, creating space for works that resist commercial polish and embrace material intervention. Their curatorial projects have been presented at Slamdance, Rockaway Beach Film Festival, and San Diego Underground Film Festival, among others, and they are currently an associative programmer at LA Filmforum.

In addition to their curatorial practice, Gurry is an educator, teaching at California State University, Los Angeles, USC, and NYU, where they foster conversations around animation’s radical potential as both personal expression and cultural critique. They have an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (rip),

Selected Screenings

  • Toronto International Film Festival – Toronto, Canada

  • Ottawa International Animation Festival – Ottawa, Canada

  • International Film Festival Rotterdam – Rotterdam, Netherlands

  • Slamdance Film Festival – Park City, Utah

  • Vienna Shorts – Vienna, Austria

  • London Short Film Festival – London, UK

  • Outfest LGBTQ+ Film Festival – Los Angeles, CA

  • Ann Arbor Film Festival – Ann Arbor, MI

  • Gene Siskel Film Center – Chicago, IL

  • Rockaway Film Festival – New York, NY

Selected Commissions

  • Off the Air (Plants episode), Adult Swim

  • Catherine Opie – Rhetorical Landscapes, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA

  • Coldplay – People of the Pride (unreleased), Animation Director

Selected Press

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