Directory Profile

Lisa Mann teaches core XA classes, including the stop-motion physical animation class (Art of Animation), the visiting artist class (Advanced Animation Seminar), and the Theory of Contemporary Animation class.  She is known for her signature elective class, Cinematic and Media-based Installations, a production class exploring site-specific, immersive, interactive, and embedded media installations and projection mapping.

In her art practice, Mann has investigated a broad range of social and cultural issues through an intersectional feminist lens. Her research on technology and nature, homelessness, the relationship between guns and children, domestic labor, and domestic violence has culminated in media works, sculpture, site-specific installations, photography, projection mapping, community-based art, and performance art.

Mann is currently working on a new three-part installation, Dirty Laundry, at the historic Gamble House, in Pasadena, California. This work will explore the lives of the Gamble family's live-in maid and cook in early twentieth century. The project will incorporate media projections, printmaking, and sculpture. This work follows after her 2019 project at the Gamble House, The Servants, featuring video projections. 

In 2016, Mann was awarded a My Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for ROTO PASADENA, a community-based public artwork featuring rotoscope animations projection-mapped onto Pasadena’s City Hall, Police Station and Public Library.

Mann was the co-author and co-organizer of the SCA 2018 symposium, Breaking the Glass Frame: Women and Animation, Past, Present, Future, focusing on women, diversity, and inclusion in the animation industry and academia. The event occurred during the height of the #MeToo movement to spotlight women’s achievements in animation and explore solutions to sexual harassment, bias, and lack of diversity in the industry and academia.

Mann has co-authored and organized several USC Visions and Voices, Arts and Humanities events, including Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ Re-animated in 2019. This live, interactive, immersive event was a collaboration with all six of USC’s art schools and featured 40 minutes of original, Frankenstein-themed animation by Hench-DADA students projected onto USC’s Doheny Library façade. Other notable V&V events she has authored/co-authored and organized are Art, Activism, and Reproductive Arts (2023), The Vanishing Worlds of Audubon (2022), Latent Memory: Present Visions of Latin American Political Past (2017), Wonderland Unbound (2014), Kathy Rose: New Media and Performance Artist (2012), PiKA PiKA! Light Animation (2011), Colombian Avant-Garde Animation (2010), and Animated Spaces | Animated Bodies (2009).

Mann received her BA in Art from Brown University and MFA from CalArts Experimental Animation program. Her thesis film received a Student Academy Award (Silver, Alternative). She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, the Brody Arts Fund, the Annenberg Foundation Independent Media grant, and several grants from the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs.

Mann’s art can be seen at www.lisa-mann.com