Animateka's Video Blog: Interview with Maya Yonesho

Maya Yonesho conducts a children workshop at the Animateka festival in Maribor – she also led a similar workshop in Ljubljana. Her films can be seen tomorrow at 11 a.m. at the Kino Udarnik cinema, while the animated movie about Maribor, the end product of a workshop held in the Vetrinjski dvor palace, will be on display tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the concluding event.

Maya Yonesho was born in 1965 in Hyogo, Japan. She studied visual design and animation at Kyoto Saga University of Arts. After six years of teaching art education, she returned to Kyoto City University of Arts where she studied painting and conceptual art and media. She also participated in the creation of children's television program as clay animator and co-creator. During her student exchange at the Royal College of Art in Great Britain she produced her first abstract animated short film We can understand each other without understanding each language, which was synchronized in 13 languages. After her 1998 master's degree in Fine Arts, she began to create independent films, including Believe in it, for which she was awarded the Excellence Award of Japan Culture Agency. Between 2002 and 2003 the Japaese Government study programme for promising artists and an art scholarship allowed her to work in the Estonian studio Eesti Joonisfilm. Here she created, together with eight Estonian bookbinding specialists, the movie Üks Uks. In 2005 she produced the trailer for the events of the International Female Animation Film Festival Tricky Women.
Her films have been on display at numerous international festivals and in many museums, including the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Germany and the Design Museum in Estonia. She is also conducting numerous animation workshops. When conducting a workshop in Vienna she filmed the movie Wiener Wuast, a realistic view of the city with her own drawings in her hands. She conducted all her workshops the same way: in Taiwan, Norway, Croatia, Israel, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Korea, USA, Serbia and Latvia. And she will continue, carrying out her life's work. Since 2000 she has been a lecturer of Kyoto Seika University.

Filmography: Introspection (1998), Believe in it (1998), Learn to love(1999), Countdown(2002), Üks Uks (2003), Wiener Wuast (2006), Suvehetk (2011).