Aline Helmcke

Germany

Aline Helmcke is a visual artist, animation director and researcher specialised in drawing, collage and 2D animation techniques. She studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Berlin and Animation at the Royal College of Art in London. Her moving image work has been shown both in exhibition and festival contexts nationally and internationally such as Transmediale Berlin, Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, Athens Animfest and CutOut Fest Mexico.
Aline is also active as a film curator and University lecturer and is currently teaching animation at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee and the Hochschule für Kunst und Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle. During her time as a tutor at the Bauhaus University, she co-founded the Poetry Film Award with Guido Naschert and was involved in the publication of the Poetry Film Magazine.

Nadya Svirskaia

USSR

Nadya (aka Nadezhda) Svirskaia was born in Naberezhnye Chelny, USSR. She is curator and producer of animation projects.
She studied journalism at Kazan State University and later graduated as an art curator from the Free Workshops Contemporary Art School at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
Nadya lived in Moscow from 2001 to 2022. During this time, she organised exhibitions, screenings and thematic events dedicated to artistic animation in collaboration with museums, galleries and festivals in various cities.
In 2019, she founded the international nomadic micro-festival “Shcha 7 Seconds Animated Films” with friends. The festival has been presented at the Big Cartoon Festival, Animafest Zagreb, StopTrik Festival, Zubroffka, Supertoon, Countryside Animafest Cyprus and the Festival of Animation Berlin.
Nadya is directly involved in political animation activism and is an outspoken opponent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
She has been based in Berlin since 2022.

Michaël Vandebril

Belgium

Michaël Vandebril (1972) is a Flemish poet who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2012, his poetry debut Het vertrek van Maeterlinck / L’exil de Maeterlinck, a collection which appeared immediately in the two most important national languages (Dutch and French). In some poems in this volume he collaborated with other poets including the French Jacques Roubaud and the Romanian Doina Ioanid. In 2016 his second poetry book New Romantics was published. His latest publication is an epic poems of 455 verses on his travels on the Roman Via Appia, Op de weg van Appia. Michaël Vandebril makes part of Versopolis, a European poetry platform that creates new opportunities for European poets. His poems have been translated into several languages. Vandebril is also a literary curator and organizer.

Photo (c) Jeyda Jagiz