Shira Avni is an animation filmmaker/professor of Film Animation at Concordia University in Montreal. Her earlier animated documentary films John and Michael (2005), Tying Your Own Shoes (2009), and Petra's Poem (2012), produced with the National Film Board of Canada, have garnered over 30 awards, including the DOK Leipzig Golden Dove and NHK Japan Prize, and screened in over 100 festivals worldwide. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her most recent film, Two One Two (2023), has won 21 international awards and 15 nominations to date, including the Special Jury Prize at the Sommets du Cinéma d'animation, Best Animated Short Film at the Berlin Short Film Festival, the Nonviolence Award at Ann Arbor, Best Documentary Microshort at Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology, Best Minidoc at the Sebastopol International Documentary Film Festival, and Best International Animation at the AmiCorti International Film Festival, as well as a Golden Sheaf Award nomination, with over 155 film festival screenings worldwide.
Shira Avni is the proud recipient of a 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award at Concordia, where she teaches under camera animation, animated documentary, advanced animation filmmaking, and other courses. Her current research weaves documentary, animation, and personal memoir to address questions of neurodiversity, identity, social justice, motherhood, and interdependence through luminous clay-on-glass animation, back-lit to create the shimmering effect of stained glass in motion.