Memorial Save the Date flyer

Next Animator Open House is Saturday, July 18 at 5 pm at the Highlands Art Center, 1140 Cherokee Road

"Animator Open House" is a bi-monthly get-together of animators and animation fans featuring screenings and discussion. At each event, four local animators will show either finished work or work in progress and talk about how and why they do what they do and ask for feedback from the audience. This open house to grow the local animation community will be on Saturday, July 18 at 5 pm at the Highlands Art Center, 1140 Cherokee Road. Please RSVP at the

Highlands Art Center calendar.

Featured for July 18, 2026

Carrie Neumayer

Carrie Neumayer is a musician, multimedia artist, and art therapist who views art as a vehicle for connection, transformation, and transcendence. Grounded in a philosophy that prioritizes the creative process over the final product, her work explores art-making as a means of personal and collective release. At the Animator Open House, she will present Self Destruct, a stop-motion piece born during the isolation of the 2020 pandemic. The project involved meticulously building a 100-layer collage in her basement, only to systematically destroy it frame by frame.

Lexi Bass

“Murry, May I?” 2026 Work-In-Progress, Lexi Bass

Columbia, Missouri is the halfway point on my annual pilgrimage west to visit in-laws. Feeling like the unsung hero of a wagon train pulling the family toward a destination I was already dreading, I left the hotel at 9:30 p.m. for an emergency takeout run.

Three minutes later, a sign for Murry’s beckoned me into a perfect time capsule from another era—perhaps two. Their motto promised “good food, good jazz.” I went in for the first half of that motto, and if a hungry child wasn’t waiting for me, I would have stayed for the second half, indefinitely. I may have even made Columbia, MO my new home.

This musical audio/visual performance documents the fantasy I had in the fifteen minutes I waited at the bar for my take-out order.

Beth Peloff

Beth Peloff is a stop motion animator who loves to play with textures and colors and experiment with combining words, sounds and pictures to tell stories in different ways. She will show a completed sand animation, “Breath, Body, Becoming” and excerpts from her work in progress, “It’s Not Just About Women.” This current project is an animated experimental documentary which combines the voices of women, trans and nonbinary people with a variety of animation techniques to explore the impact of Second Wave Feminism and project its legacy into the future.