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Kalia Firester
Harvard
Ulster University, Belfast (UUB)
Arts/Performing Arts/Film
After spending her Mitchell year studying Animation at Ulster University, Kalia has started work with ALT Animation in Belfast, animating on a children’s television show. She combines her passion for science, animation, and filmmaking to create works that elucidate complex subjects that are otherwise difficult to observe. She completed her work as an animator on "Sullivan Sails" — a new children's program aimed at inspiring a love of the environment and exploration. It had its premiere on RTÉ Junior. As an Art, Film, and Visual Studies major at Harvard University, she created films on topics as varied as the disappearance of the Monarch butterflies and the last cobbler in Cambridge. Her short, animated story about a mother watching her daughter travel to Mars was a finalist in NASA’s Project Mars International Film Competition in 2018. She created an animated fiction film for her senior thesis that used virtual reality to present the intergenerational responsibility for climate change. As an animator in MIT’s Media Lab, she assisted in the production of the first holographic film that went to Sundance. Her international experience includes assisting on an animated feature film about Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s life (and thoughts) as he shot one of his most controversial films in the 1930s.