Emily Pelstring is a Canadian artist and tenured professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Her animated short films have screened widely at film festivals, including Slamdance, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Transmediale Berlin, Images, and Internationale Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) presented a 13-film retrospective of her work in 2020. In 2023, the GIRAF Festival presented a second retrospective of her work. Her animation practice has been profiled in Animation World Network, Cartoon Brew, and ASIFA, and featured on CBC Gem’s Canadian Reflections series. Her recent animations, Hedge Rider (2022) and A Flame the Colour of Air (2025) were created with support from Canada Council for the Arts and residencies at the Toronto Animated Image Society, Studio Kura, the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, Fondation La Napoule, and Mudhouse, and development funding from the National Film Board of Canada. It has screened around the world and won 2nd Prize for Best Experimental Film at the ASIFA East Awards.
Parallel to, and often in connection with her film work, Emily creates sculptural installations that expand cinema into material space. Her early media installations, Standard Play (Khyber Centre for the Arts, 2015), Scotopia (La Centrale, 2017), and Butterfly FX (Modern Fuel, 2021), used the Pepper’s Ghost illusion along with mixed-media sculptures.