News & Events

Eric Dyer Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
Friday, May 11th, 2012 //
http://my.umbc.edu/news/14007


Copenhagen Cycles (2006) by Eric Dyer

Professor Eric Dyer was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for creative arts in the film-video category. The 181 awardees were selected from 3,000 applicants. Professor Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator, and educator whose award-winning films have screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, South by Southwest, and the Ottawa, Annecy, Melbourne, and London International Animation Festivals. His work has also been exhibited at the Exploratorium, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica, and the Cairo and Venice Biennales.

His area of creative research has focused on the zoetrope, a pre-cinema optical toy, and using it to create and explore a visual language of loops and spirals. When spun, the complex circular sculptures, dubbed cinetropes, are a blur to the human eye but come to full animated life when viewed through shutter glasses or the lens of a fast-shutter video camera. Dyer's projects are exhibited as both films and installations.

Eric is currently a visiting artist at California Institute of the Arts in the School of Film/Video's Experimental Animation program.