Allison Schulnik

Directing

Allison Schulnik

Born 1978-01-01 · San Diego, California, USA

Allison Schulnik (born 1978) is an American painter, sculptor and animated film maker. She is known for her heavily textured, impasto oil paintings and her animated short videos. Schulnik is married to fellow artist Eric Yahnker. They live and work in Sky Valley, California.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Mound poster
7.5

Mound is a celebration of the moving painting, in which more than one hundred pallid puppets – clowns, spectres, gnomes, wraiths, and ghouls – writhe, sway, plod, and transform with awkward grace to the mournful musical accompaniment of It’s Raining Today(1969) by legendary singer-songwriter Scott Walker (also known as Noel Scott Engel).

Mound

2011

Moth poster
5.5

A wandering through the primal emotions of birth, motherhood, body, nature, metamorphosis and dance.

Moth

2019

No artwork available
NR

16mm live action/stop-motion animated film

The Slaying

1997

Forest poster
5.1

Long Hair Hobo, one of the artist’s favorite characters, springs to life in brightly colored and joyous clay (an enchanted palette in a savage world), his limbs and clothing beating to the rhythm of the music. He comes face to face with his alter ego, who is transformed, melts and changes into a rainbow before morphing into a lake. Long Hair Hobo is wonderstruck at the sight of this magnificent visual feast intercut with images of fields and greenspace, in what is a masterful integration of the real and virtual. An eloquent testimony to the impossibility of an unchanging identity, this work reveals the uncertainty and instability that accompany human beings throughout their lives.

Forest

2009

No artwork available
NR

A dramatic, medieval tale about an evil queen and her court jester. He performs for her, she forces him to kill himself, and then he explodes, and his gooey innards cover her entire giant castle and it magically morphs into something less evil.

Vedma

1999

Purple Mountain poster
NR

An ensemble of musicians is gathered in a performance space. Each musician has their own instrument, means of amplification (if needed), and pair of headphones. All musicians’ headphones are plugged into one outputting sound source (usually an iPod with many headphone splitters). Music (usually a well known song from the popular music canon) is played from the sound source and the musicians are instructed to play something, anything that they hear in their headphones as accurately as they can on their own instrument. The musicians never know what songs or sounds they will be hearing in advance. The audience only hears what the musicians are playing and none of the original sound source, thus creating a “tracing” of the sound source material.

Purple Mountain

2022

No artwork available
5.5

Traditional clay-mation and stop-motion animated film.

Eager

2014

No artwork available
NR

16mm stop-motion animated film

Pistachio

2000

Hobo Clown poster
NR

A stop-motion, animated film by Allison Schulnik that features Grizzly Bear's "Granny Diner," the Japanese bonus track from their 2006 album, 'Yellow House.'

Hobo Clown

2008