Nina Carolyn Paley (born May 3, 1968) is an American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, after which she worked primarily in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.
Paley distributes much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all the original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft license.
Since January 2021, Paly runs the podcast Heterodorx with Corinna Cohn.
Early life
Paley was born in Urbana, Illinois, the daughter of Jean (Passovoy) and Hiram Paley. Her family was Jewish. Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois and was mayor of Urbana for a term in the early 1970s.
She attended local elementary and high schools, graduating from University High School in 1986. She illustrated a "History of the North Pole" comic in collaboration with University High School history teacher Chris Butler, and attended the University of Illinois, studying art for two years before dropping out. While in college, her comic "Joyride" ran in The Daily Illini newspaper.
Nina's Adventures and other work
In 1988, Paley moved to Santa Cruz, California, and began to write and draw the strip Nina's Adventures. In 1991, she illustrated The Santa Cruz Haggadah and moved to San Francisco.
In 2002, she wrote and directed Fetch!, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed popularity ever since.
Beginning in 2002, Paley focused her work on the controversial subject of population growth. The most notable entry she produced on this subject was The Stork, in which the natural environment is bombed to destruction by storks dropping bundled babies. The film is a compact expression of the conflict between the increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. The 3½ minute film was a considerable success at festivals and resulted in an invitation to the Sundance Film Festival.
During this period of this time, Paley also contributed several comic strips for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, of which she is a member and occasional spokesperson. Her work for the group still remains on their official website.
In 2012, Paley posted an animation to Vimeo titled This Land Is Mine depicting the Middle East conflicts over history; it was named a Staff Pick.
Between projects, Paley has worked as a freelance director at Duck Studios in Los Angeles. She has also taught in the Design and Technology section of Parsons, part of The New School.
Apocalypse Animated
In February 2022, Paley completed her project Apocalypse Animated, creating nearly 300 animated loops for the Book of Revelation. Paley also created lenticular cards of 10 selected animations. Paley released Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixel) uncompressed Apple ProRes videos of almost 12 minutes of animation under a CC-BY-SA license and encouraged remixing of the material, proposing an audio reading of the Book of Revelation and mixing it with the animation.
Feature films
As of 2018, Paley has created two animated feature films.
Sita Sings the Blues
In 2002, Paley moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City on business concerning her third comic strip, The Hots, her husband terminated their marriage. Unable to return to either Trivandrum or San Francisco, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Her personal crisis caused her to see more deeply into the Ramayana, the Indian epic, which she had encountered in India, and motivated her to produce a short animation which combines an episode from the Ramayana with a torch song recorded in 1929 by Annette Hanshaw, "Mean To Me". Paley later added episodes and other material to the work, which is now called Sita Sings the Blues. Many of the episodes appeared in animation festivals. She expanded it into a feature-length treatment of the Ramayana focused on Rama's wife, Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques.