Arba Hatashi
Arba Hatashi was born and raised in Peja, Kosovo. She started volunteering at a very young age in different non-government organizations, with a focus on culture development. For the last ten years, she has been working actively with Anibar on organizing the only animation festival in Kosovo, managing and working on the transformation of the only active cinema in the city of Peja, Cinema Jusuf Gërvalla, into a multifunctional, social and cultural space.
She started as a volunteer in 2014 working with the festival to continue coordinating the program of the festival for three years prior to being appointed in 2019 the Festival Director of Anibar International Animation Festival.
Since 2018, she has also managed the Anibar Animation Academy and its educational projects working towards the improvement and development of education in the field of animation in Kosovo.
She has previously been a jury member at Fantoche International Animation Film Festival, and Anima – The Brussels Animation Film Festival.
Nadja Andrasev
Nadja Andrasev is an animation filmmaker with an MFA from MOME Budapest. Her films, The Noise of Licking and Symbiosis were screened at numerous festivals and received over fourty awards. After years of experience in the live action film industry, she is currently a production manager and producer of animated films, as well as pre-selection programmer and jury member at international film festivals. As a director she likes to address personal topics involving obsessions, voyeurism and sex.
Marko Dješka
Graduated at the Academy of Fine arts in Zagreb, animation department. He participated in many training programs, such as the Animation Sans Frontieres and the script writing course at La Poudriere in France. His student films ‘Slaughtered‘ (2010) and ‘The Son of Satan‘ (2012) earned notable success at many festivals, and the film ‘Slaughtered’ was bought by the TV station El Rey Network owned by producer Robert Rodriguez. Film ‘Ghost Town‘ won the Octavian award at a festival in Zagreb as the best animated film in Croatian production in 2016. His recent animated film, ‘All Those Sensations in my Belly‘ has won 25 awards and mentions and has been shown on more than a 150 festivals worldwide, such as Annecy in France, Outfest and Rhode Island Festival in USA, Message to Man and Big Cartoon in Russia, Animafest in Zagreb and OIAF in Ottawa (Canada) where it won the best script award too. He is also the co-founder of the Adriatic Animation Studio for animation production in Zagreb, and one of the organizers of the OHOHO Festival of Comics and Street Art since 2019. He’ve been publishing short comics in many magazines worldwide such as Heavy Metal (USA) and fanzines: Freakshow Comix and Gorgonzola (France), Aargh! (Chech Republic), Komikaze and Endem (Croatia). He is also the editor of two comic magazines OHOHOzin and Strip-Prefiks.
Goce Cvetanovski
Writer/Director Goce Cvetanovski studied cinema in Paris, France, where he lived for 17 years. His short movies have been screened at many festivals around the world and have received regional and national awards.
His feature directorial debut “The Business of Pleasure” premiered in June 2023 and won the Best Feature Award at In The Palace Short Film Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Goce is currently in production of the animation feature “John Vardar vs the Galaxy”. This is the biggest regional animation project ever, a co-production between N. Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary. He is also the first director of Macedonia’s most popular animated series “Bibi’s world” with over 75M views on Youtube.
He has worked on commercial projects for clients such as Ed Sheeran, Samsung and Faith No More.
Michał Bobrowski
Since 2018 he is an Associate Professor at the Culture Studies Institute, Faculty of Philology, Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (UMCS). He holds a PhD in Film Studies (degree obtained at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland in 2010). In 2012 he authored a book Akira Kurosawa. Artist of the Borderland, in 2016 and 2019 he co-edited two monographs Obsession, Perversion, Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation and Propaganda, Ideology, Animation. Twisted Dreams of History. Co-author of the book Beyond Cinema Screen. Postmedia Contexts of Animation published in 2021. Since 2010 he is a programme director and co-founder of StopTrik International Film Festival (Slovenia/Poland), an event dedicated to the art of stop motion animation. He collaborates with various European film festivals and culture institutions as a curator and activist. He has authored a number of peer-reviewed articles and chapters in books as well as popular film critiques mainly discussing issues of Japanese and American cinema and art-house animated film. He speaks Polish, English, Serbian, Croatian, and Russian.
Natasha Andonova
Natasha Andonova (1974) is an artist and illustrator of children books born in Skopje, Macedonia. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje and she was a residence artist at the Cité International des Arts – Paris, 2006. She is member of DLUM the Macedonian Association of Fine Artists. She has more than dosen individual exhibitions and many group exhibitions in Macedonia and abroad. Her engagement vary from feature movie productions, at the costume department ( “Dust” , “Shadows” by Milcho Manchevki ), as well as in theatre productions (Drama Theatre Skopje , Youth and Children’s Theatre Skopje, Children’s Theatre Center Skopje, Turkish Theatre Skopje, also in the costume department and design). Since 2017 she works as an illustrator and digital artist at the Lynx Animation Studio, Skopje. She is known in the field of illustration and painting, costume design and set design, as well as storyboard artist.