May 1, 2010
Signe Baumane was born and raised in Latvia, graduating from Moscow University in 1989 with a B.A. in Philosophy. She started work at Dauka Animation Studio in Riga as an animator and cel painter.
Since 1995, she has lived in NYC, having worked on I Married a Strange Person with Bill Plympton and animation inserts for XX/XY among many other projects.
Her animation ranges from her 1991 debut The Witch and the Cow to more recent works including The Teat Beat of Sex, and Veterinarian, about the circle of life and death. Her Womanimation! short film Birth is about Amina, a seventeen year old girl who is pregnant and afraid to give birth who goes to older women for consolation and advice, and finds that their stories scare her even more.
Signe is continually screening her many animated shorts in the major film festivals like Sundance and Berlin; she also screens in major animation festivals like Annecy.
In addition to animation, Signe has illustrated books, worked in puppet theater design, taught animation at Pratt Institute, and is periodically publishing parts of a novel about her adventures in New York in Una, a Latvian women’s magazine. She is a Fellow in Film of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the recipient of an individual artist grant from The Jerome Foundation, and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.