Featured Author: Nina Paley

When people will be choosing a new version of the Ramayana to read (or watch!) in Week 5, I hope a lot of people will want to choose Nina Paley's full-length animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. I've written a Reading Guide for the film, and you can watch it at YouTube:

You can find out more about the remarkable Nina Paley at her blog, where she is documenting her next work in progress: Seder Masochism. Here is one of the videos she recently released of the animation she is doing for that film: The Golden Calf.

The Golden Calf (Return of the Goddess) from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Not only is Nina an incredibly talented and innovative artist, she is also one of the most visible and persuasive defenders of the public domain and an activist against copyright restrictions; you can learn more about this movement at QuestionCopyright.org. For more insight into Nina's thoughts on free culture and her own creative process (her VERY creative process), you can listen to this delightful talk: Sita Sings the Blues: The Ramayana and "Free Culture."

And here are a couple of Nina's wonderful Mimi and Eunice cartoons, now being translated into so many languages because she has released them with a CC license:

Legal Fictions

Walls

Censorship vs. Copyright

Protection