Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) Names All-Canadian Jury for 50th Edition
Skwigly
The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) will celebrate its 50th anniversary this September with an all-Canadian jury, underscoring five decades of championing Canadian animation and the artists shaping its future. This is the first all-Canadian jury in OIAF history.
The jury brings together leading voices in Canadian animation: Luc Chamberland, Lillian Chan, Dave Cooper, Barry Doupé, Alexandra Myotte and Alisi Telengut. Together, the jurors represent a wide range of creative practices and perspectives across Canadian animation and the broader arts community.
Given that it’s our 50th anniversary and that we’re taking time to celebrate five decades of Canadian animation (more on that soon!), I thought, why not have an all-Canadian jury as well, just to spice things up. We’ve got such a dynamic, diverse, and large community, I thought it would be nice to add some established voices, new voices and people who skirt the lines between the animation and art world.
Chris Robinson, OIAF’s Artistic Director
The jury will be divided into short film and feature film juries. Jury members will view the official selections during the festival and select award winners, to be announced Sept. 26, 2026, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
The OIAF is accepting film submissions until 11:59 p.m. EDT on May 31, 2026. There is no submission fee. Selected films will screen at the festival and be eligible for awards.
Each year, OIAF attracts over 27,000 filmmakers, industry professionals and animation fans from around the world. The festival serves as a major international showcase for animated work and brings global attention to Canadian and international artists alike.
About Luc Chamberland
Luc Chamberland is a Montreal-based filmmaker, comic-book author and animator whose work spans commercials, documentaries, music videos, television and film. He restored the 1914 classic Gertie the Dinosaur and directed the creative bible and pilot for Wild Kratts. He has also made several films at the National Film Board of Canada, including the award-winning Seth’s Dominion, and has taught directing, storyboarding and animation in Denmark, the UK and Canada.
About Lillian Chan
Lillian Chan is a Toronto-based animation filmmaker. Her National Film Board children’s film Jaime Lo, Small and Shy won the public prize at both the Ottawa International Animation Festival and Anima Mundi in Brazil. Chan served as production designer and head of story for Kid Koala’s animated feature Space Cadet, which screened at Berlinale, Annecy and TIFF in 2025. She was also the mentoring director for Hothouse 15, the National Film Board’s mentorship program for emerging filmmakers. Her other credits include contributions to Ann Marie Fleming’s animated feature Window Horses and commercial work for DisneyXD, Guru Studios and TED-Ed. Chan is a professor of animation at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto.
About Dave Cooper
Dave Cooper emerged in the 1990s with a series of underground comics published by Fantagraphics, most notably Weasel and Ripple, the latter featuring an introduction by David Cronenberg. He later shifted into oil painting, exhibiting in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Angoulême, while also publishing several monographs of his artwork. Around 2008, he moved into animation, co-creating Pig Goat Banana Cricket and The Bagel and Becky Show before releasing the acclaimed short film The Absence of Eddy Table. In 2024, Cooper unveiled a wave of new work in Paris, including the first issue of his comic series Dog Head, a new vinyl toy version of his character Mimi Wobbly and his largest gallery exhibition to date, Swollen in Paris, at Galerie Daniel Maghen. He has since returned to painting, completed the short film Squash, published Dog Head and continues to work from Ottawa.
About Barry Doupé
Barry Doupé is an artist working primarily in computer animation, digital painting and sculpture. His work uses imagery and language derived from the subconscious, developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. Doupé’s films are often characterized by fragmented narrative structures, richly textured characters and surreal, poetic situations.
His films have been screened throughout Canada and internationally, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, e-flux screening room in New York, Swallow Gallery in Lithuania, DOK Leipzig in Germany, Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou in Paris and Deluge Contemporary in Victoria. In 2024, he was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Doupé lives and works in Vancouver on the traditional and ancestral unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
About Alexandra Myotte
Alexandra Myotte is an independent Canadian film director known for her animated shorts. She works with her partner Jean-Sébastien Hamel in the Montreal-based studio Semaphore Films. Their 2023 short film A Crab in the Pool screened at more than 130 festivals and won more than 30 awards before making the 2025 Academy Awards shortlist. In 2026, What We Leave Behind premiered at Locarno, TIFF, Clermont-Ferrand and SXSW. Their next short film, Drink Me, will be released in 2027. The duo is currently working on their first animated feature.
About Alisi Telengut
Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian roots, living between Berlin, Germany, and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her practice consists of frame-by-frame, under-the-camera animation using mixed media, generating painterly, handmade visuals. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Whitney Biennial, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten, the Annecy International Animation Festival and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in film animation at Concordia University and recently defended her PhD at Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.