Tara Knight is a filmmaker, animator, and media designer for live performance.
Her broad range of media practices includes animated shorts, dance collaborations, world-premiere projection designs, visual reality, and media installations. Recent projection design for live performance includes The Great Wave (The Berkeley Rep, 2019), Ballast (Diversionary Theater, 2017), and Hollywood! (La Jolla Playhouse, 2016). The Floating World, a performance she co-created with Malashock Dance, was awarded an Emmy in 2011.
Knight’s animated film, Unsettled (2018), screened at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Annecy International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb, the Black Maria Film Festival, and beyond. Her Mikumentary series of films have screened in institutions ranging from pop culture to fine arts, including: New York Comic Con, South by Southwest Interactive panel, Time Warner’s “Future of Storytelling,” animation festivals in Britain, Hong Kong, and Mexico, toured with Miku the hologram herself in North America, and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Knight has collaboratively created over two dozen short, improvised dance films including documenting the Think Gravity Dance Tank, an intergenerational research gathering in 2022 through a dozen films, audio interviews, and more.
Current projects include Sound Planetarium, a multidisciplinary project to create an interactive, data-driven virtual reality experience for both artistic and scientific research, as well as serving as the co-Director of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts.
Knight began her career as an optical printing assistant, a painter on the films of animation pioneer Faith Hubley, and as an animation assistant for Emily Hubley on her short films and the cult hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Knight received a B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She is currently an Associate Professor of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she received the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Outstanding Mentor Award in 2021, and the William Payden Award for Faculty Teaching and Research and Excellence in 2019.
