May McKernan is an award-winning animator and educator with over 5 years of experience bringing indie, nonprofit, and commercial animation to life. In the media agency world, she has designed for clients including SAMHSA, National Geographic, and Anacostia Community Museum, amongst others. On the rebellious side of the animation scene, she has made a mark with music videos for Surgery Season, Jan Julius, and Wasted Shirt (Ty Segall and Brian Chippendale). Suffice to say, her experience splits joyfully between trusted brand expression and freak-flag animated off-roading.

In her practice, May views art-making as an act against the closeted self. Deference and defiance wrestle within her animations as they do equally within her heart. Across these extremes, she extrapolates narratives defining the struggles that lead to breaking points. These stories rely on the subconscious, emotionally resonant paths she finds beneath the surface in dreams, family history, and happy accidents. Her process combines traditional methods with dadaist experimentation, resulting in a mix of meticulous planning and wild-eyed spontaneity. In her music video work, she has explored queer repression through the prism of candle wax, authoritarian treatments of trans autonomy as physical property, and surgery as doorway to the afterlife. In other works, she has made triptychs memorializing her mother’s childhood and short-form animations of seas, mountains, and cities recalling the landscapes of her youth in Southern Oregon. Her work has screened competitively in the United States, Spain, and Canada. 

Recently, May animated an upcoming single from the Portland hyperpop duo Surgery Season. Earlier this year, May was a colorist on Christina Fidler’s Adult Swim Smalls series Meeble & Creeble and has collaborated with several independent films from local DMV filmmakers, including the upcoming ‘Two Lovers on the Yangtze’ by JP Wogaman. She is currently available to freelance in all things 2D animation and video editing. Quietly when no one is looking, she is developing a feature-length animated musical.

CONTACT
Email / aceilinglesssky [at] gmail.com