About Lynn Tomlinson

Lynn Tomlinson is an award-winning animator, filmmaker, and visual artist known for her distinctive clay-on-glass animation. Working with thin layers of oil-based modeling clay, she creates richly textured moving images through a handcrafted stop-motion process, transforming the material frame by frame directly beneath the camera. Her films come to life through fluid transformations, shifting perspectives, and the tactile qualities of painting in motion.

Her work explores environmental themes, memory, place, and humanity's relationship with the natural world. Her films imagine how animals, landscapes, and other living beings might experience the world and the changes taking place around them. Music is also central to her filmmaking, with animation, sound, and movement coming together to create lyrical and immersive experiences.

Lynn's films have been presented internationally at museums, cultural institutions, and major animation festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Her work has also been broadcast on ARTE in France and Germany and theatrically released in the United States through The Animation Show of Shows.

Her award-winning films include The Elephant’s Song, The Ballad of Holland Island House , and I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died. Her music video Ten Degrees of Strange , created for musician/actor Johnny Flynn and writer Robert Macfarlane, received Best Commissioned Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Her newest film, A Black Rail's Tale, created in collaboration with writer and cultural ornithologist J. Drew Lanham and featuring an original score by guitarist Yasmin Williams, continues her exploration of environmental history, non-human perspectives, and the stories embedded within landscapes.

A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Lynn has received numerous honors for her films and body of work, including the Baker Artist Award, a Saul Zaentz Fund Fellowship, the Edison Innovation Award from the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film Festival, and Independent Artist Awards from the state arts councils of Maryland, Florida, and Pennsylvania. The importance of her work is recognized in publications in the field of animation studies including Fluid Frames (Routledge) and The Animation Bible. Her work has also been featured on the websites Colossal, Short of the Week, and as Vimeo Staff Picks.

Lynn has been honored as a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow and as Artist in Residence at Green Box Arts in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Baker Artist Award

In 2026, Lynn received the Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize, the Baker Artist Award's top prize across all creative disciplines, recognizing her body of work in film and animation and her distinctive artistic vision. The honor follows her 2022 Baker Artist Award for Film and previous recognition as a Baker Artist Awards finalist.

Her Baker Artist Portfolio offers a deeper look at her clay-on-glass films, environmental storytelling, immersive animation, and ongoing exploration of transformation, memory, and the natural world.

Beyond the Screen

Lynn's practice extends beyond traditional filmmaking into immersive and expanded forms of animation. Her fulldome work transforms handcrafted animation into shared, hemispheric experiences for planetariums and other immersive environments.

Projects including Mountain Nocturne and Reverie de Giverny explore the possibilities of animation beyond the traditional screen, while Kendra's Bay combines animation, digital puppetry, and live performance. Across these forms, transformation remains central to her practice—both in the physical reshaping of materials beneath the camera and in animation's ability to shift perspective.

Her fulldome work has often involved collaboration with colleagues and students, creating projects which have gone on to win top awards and international exhibitions. Our Colorful World won Best Educational Film at Dome Fest West. Ignite! won the Prix d’Originalité at SATFest in Montreal, and AquaDome played in dome festivals across Europe as part of Chomosphere.

Her interdisciplinary practice has also included curatorial projects such as Sister Cities Animated and Cross-Pollinated: Hybrid Art Abuzz, bringing together animation, visual art, collaboration, and experimentation.

Artist & Educator

Lynn is a professor at Towson University, where her teaching and creative practice span animation, film, media arts, and emerging forms of immersive storytelling. Before joining Towson in 2014, she taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cornell University, the University of the Arts, and other colleges and universities.

Her commitment to teaching has been recognized with an award from the University Film and Video Association and two Innovation in Teaching Awards from Towson University. She regularly mentors emerging animators and artists interested in handcrafted and experimental approaches to media creation.

Lynn has also presented workshops, master classes, and invited lectures in the United States and internationally. Her writing on animation, immersive media, and creative practice has appeared in Animation Journal, Animation Practice, Process & Production, Con A de Animación, and HyperRhiz: New Media Cultures.