Blyth Hazen

“I suggest that my students get up and move around as much as possible when making animation. This is good for the wellbeing of the body – but also it is a way to search for the gestures that help us identify and connect to the human condition. These gestures are then revealed in our characters, in our stories and in the worlds we build.”

—Blyth Hazen

Blyth Hazen is currently the Coordinator of the Games, Toys & Play concentration at Montserrat, where she is inspired every day by the characters, mechanics, and the worlds her students create. She first came to Montserrat College of Art in the late 1990s to help integrate digital tools into the curriculum. Since then, she has worked with students from their first year to their senior year, teaching tools and concepts as diverse as drawing, 2D animation, 3D modeling, game development, stop motion, kinetics and robotics, and puppets. Her creative and teaching practice often involves making things that move. Sometimes they appear to do this on their own, on a screen, while other times, they need more human engagement to be activated, like a puppet, robot, or an automata. 

In 2019, Blyth and her collaborator, the artist Ruth Bauer, completed the stop-motion animation titled The War Dept. Blyth and Ruth are currently working together on a multi-year, stop-motion project with the working title Big Sky. This animated short is a coming of age story about a young artist living in Texas in the 1960s. Both Ruth and Blyth grew up in Texas, and both left as young adults, but Texas never left them. The characters and the stories in Big Sky are amalgamation of their own childhood experiences dealing with religion, race, beauty, the landscape, and horned toads. Updates on the progress of Big Sky can be found on on Blyth’s Instagram.

Blyth has a BA in Art and Philosophy from Austin College in Sherman, TX and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. Examples of Blyth’s earlier sculptural, robotic, automata, and programmed animations can be viewed at blythhazen.com.

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