Nicole Antebi

Co-director of The Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2 

Affiliate Faculty Latin American Studies 

LIverman Scholar Mentor 2023-2025

I am an animator and moving image artist whose work explores the intersection of storytelling, place, and belief. My practice is rooted in a deep curiosity about how different cultures-past and present-assign personhood, memory and mysticism to the land. Through animation, I investigate place-based animism and the ways in which landscapes become vessels for knowledge, spirituality, and hope, especially for times of crisis.

Driven by a desire to expand, the language of storytelling, I use animation as a tool to bridge the seen and unseen-to animate histories, rituals and relationships that are often invisible or intangible. My work invites viewers to consider how a place holds power, emotion, and ancestral presence.

From a young age, I became acutely aware of the inequities facing Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Fronteriza/o/x/s who reside in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad, Juárez, the region where I came of age. In the years since I graduated from high school in 1993, following the signing of NAFTA, I watched the two cities, that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.

I am an assistant professor of Illustration and Animation at The University of Arizona and have previously taught at CUNY Queens College, SUNY Albany, and in 2019 I was a visiting professor at la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. 

Contact: nantebi@arizona.edu