Nicole Antebi is an animator and moving image artist whose work explores the intersection of storytelling, place, and belief. Her practice is rooted in a deep curiosity about how different cultures -past and present - assign personhood, memory, and mysticism to the land. Through animation, she investigates place-based animism and the ways in which landscapes become vessels for knowledge, spirituality, and hope, especially for times of crisis.
From a young age, Antebi became acutely aware of the inequities facing Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and/or Fronterizo/a who reside in the borderlands of El Paso, TX and Ciudad, Juárez, the region where she came of age. In the years since, she graduated from high school in 1993 and following the signing of NAFTA, watched the two cities (that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community) become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.
Driven by a desire to expand the language of storytelling, Antebi uses animation as a tool to bridge the seen and unseen and to animate histories, rituals and relationships that are often invisible or intangible. Her work invites viewers to consider how contested places hold power, emotion, and ance.
At MacDowell, Antebi worked on developing animated sequences for her essay about four significant hugs that took place in El Paso from 2019-2025.
Nicole Antebi
Studios
Adams
Nicole Antebi worked in the Adams studio.
Given to the MacDowell Association by Margaret Adams of Chicago, the half-timbered, stuccoed Adams Studio was designed by MacDowell Fellow and architect F. Tolles Chamberlin ca. 1914. Chamberlin was primarily a painter, but also provided designs for The Lodge and an early renovation of the Main Hall. The studio’s structural integrity…