Ruth animates in film, video and pre-cinema formats such as flipbooks, zoetropes and praxinoscopes, taking essayistic approaches to autobiography, history and visual experience. Her early films Eggs (16mm film, 1977) and Body Sketches (16mm film, 1978) explored different approaches to hand-drawn animation, repetition, and improvisation in filming imagery. Wanda (video, 1990) contrasts feline and feminine desire. Reign of the Dog; A Re-visionist History (16mm film, 1994) critiques mainstream representations of the conquest of the Americas. On Our Way (digital video, 2011) takes a uses a quote from Ralph waldo Emerson as a jumping off point to contrast wild and settled landscapes in western Washington State. Ruth has exhibited her flipbooks widely in artists' book shows, including the 2005 Daumenkino: The Flipbook Show at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf. They are in the collections of Library of the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and the University of Washington's Suzzalo Library. Ruth frequently works in 16mm film, focusing on direct animation, participating in Crackpot Crafters, a consortium of artists working in that technique and collaborating on expanded cinema performance. In 2013 she produced Super Moon Sand Photograms, derived from loops of raw stock exposed by moonlight, hand-processed and projected in performances in Olympia and Albuquerque. Copper Perforation Loop Triptych and Perilous Experiment (2016) further experiment with the material, haptic and stochastic effects of direct animation. Amulet (2022) continues her exploration of using analog film to generate images that she further manipulates digitally. In Hemorrhage (2023), Ruth animated rubbings on paper, print transfers from The New York Times and voices sampled from arguments before the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health to protest the overturning of Roe and the evisceration of women's rights to bodily autonomy.