This is a media-archaeological excavation of the unique animation teaching methods of artist Sky David, formerly known as Dennis Pies, who has spent his life combining art and science, working with movement, subjectivity, tactility, and animacy—an interdisciplinary practice in the most expansive, beyond-the-frame ways.
In a field where animation pedagogy is so often reduced to industry pipelines, Sky David’s teaching offers another lineage—one that emphasizes grounding, bodily awareness, and vision as touch. His exercises remind us that animating is not just about bringing drawings to life but also about cultivating awareness of movement in ourselves, through the body, the hand, the eye, and the page.
In the 1960s–70s, experimental animators were central to the U.S. expanded cinema movement, combining analogue invention with nascent digital experimentation, blurring boundaries between life and art, spirituality and technology. Their films fed Hollywood visual effects, imagined immersive digital worlds, and set the stage for today’s pervasive animation culture. It was in this atmosphere of experimentation that Sky David emerged as an artist.
In 1988-89, I studied with Sky David in graduate school in Philadelphia at University of the Arts, which suddenly, shockingly, closed in 2024. Like all good animation teachers, he screened a wide range of international work. But his assignments were unlike the bouncing balls, flour sacks, and walk cycles of the usual “Animation I.” His exercises were kinesthetic, bodily, and tactile, rooted in somatic awareness.
In 2014, decades later, I visited Sky David in his San Diego studio. I reached out to his former students and colleagues, reconstructing his teaching legacy in preparation for my 2015 Society for Animation Studies conference presentation in Canterbury, UK. Rhode Island School of Design Professor Amy Kravitz, who was Sky David’s teaching assistant at Harvard, spoke highly of his influence, and has adapted elements from his lessons in her own teaching exercises, as did several other former students of Sky’s.
Moments before I gave my 2015 Society for Animation Studies presentation, my University of the Arts classmate, animator Jim Downer, emailed me the Holy Grail of Sky’s pedagogy of animation: a 19-page photocopy of a hand-typed handout from the late 1980s. “EIGHT LESSONS FOR DEVELOPING KINESTHETIC AWARENESS BY USING FILM ANIMATION” (Pies c. 1988) survived in Jim’s teaching files, and Jim told me he still used them with his students: “It doesn’t overwhelm new students or students struggling with realizing who they are as animators. Probably the most important lesson.”
Sky’s exercises formed what I’ve come to think of as an experimental alternative to the Disney animators’ “12 Principles of Animation.” (Thomas & Johnston, 1997). Instead of “squash-and-stretch” or “appeal,” Sky offered lessons grounded in touch, observation, and bodily presence.
Lesson One, Grounding, asked students to place their hands directly on the pages of a pad tracing paper “as if the paper were skin,” moving from the last page to the first, without a light table, responding to translucence and creating a sensuous connection between body, paper, pigment, and motion. Another, The Screen as One Dynamic Surface, had students make rubbings of textures, training them to see the film frame not as a window but as a vibrating surface. Perhaps the most powerful was The Movement of the Eyes Organizes the Movement of the Body, looking through a simple viewfinder and moving one’s body through space, noting changes in the relations of objects in the environment, connecting sightlines, spatial awareness, parallax, and rhythm. What these exercises cultivated was not technical polish but embodied vision—a sensitivity to the tactile and perceptual roots of animation.
Where did this approach come from? In the early 1970s, Sky David was a student of Jules Engel at California Institute of the Arts. His films including Merkaba (1973), Aura Corona (1973), and Luma Nocturna (1974), combined organic abstraction with spiritual and cosmological themes. He was recognized as a rising figure in the first edition of Experimental Animation that featured a two-page interview under the name Dennis Pies. (Russett and Starr, 1976, pp.24-25) In the mid-1970s, Sky David was part of the Bay Area experimental art community, influenced by animator Larry Jordan and by classes with Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, founder of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic movement awareness. Sky David adapted these ideas into a pedagogy of kinesthetic animation, teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (1977-1980), Harvard University (1980–84), and University of the Arts (1984–92).
Russett and Starr’s 1988 edition of Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art included the line: “With teachers such as Robert Breer, Larry Jordan, Jules Engel, and Dennis Pies in some of the country’s major art schools, sparks are bound to ignite unpredictably.”(p.17) I remember reading that as a graduate student and wondering: could I be one of those sparks?
For me, rediscovering his eight lessons has been a process of memory and recognition. I realized how much they had shaped my own animation, especially my clay-on-glass work with its tactile, parallax-driven movements, and my teaching practice. Sky David’s pedagogy is a legacy worth remembering, and reanimating.
By 1992, Sky had grown disenchanted with teaching. Many students wanted job-ready training — far from his orientation toward bodily awareness and expanded vision. He left the University of the Arts and shifted toward alternative healing practices. Drawing on his engineering background, he designed therapeutic devices using light to aid the lymphatic system—naming one device Lumina Nocturna, echoing his California Institute of the Arts film. The studio I visited in 2014 was part animation studio, part engineering lab, part health therapy office, part shrine.
Sky continues to create luminous work, organic watercolors and figurative drawings, often from the point of view of a sniper in a ghillie suit, recalling his Vietnam experience. (David, 2010) His practice continues to weave together art, science, trauma, and healing. A few years ago, he gave his Oxberry animation stand to California Institution of the Arts, where students can work under-the-camera, as he once did.
References
Pies, Dennis, c.1988. Eight Lessons for Developing Kinesthetic Awareness by Using Film Animations. Unpublished classroom handout, Photo, Film & Animation Department, University of the Arts, 19 pp.
Thomas, Frank; Ollie Johnston (1997) [1981]. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Hyperion. pp. 47–69.
Russett, Robert. and Starr, Cecile, 1977. Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, pp. 24-25.
Russett, Robert. and Starr, Cecile, 1988. Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. 2nd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, p. 17.
David, S., 2010. Interviewed by Stephanie Sapienza, oral history 17 April. Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980. Alternative Projections. [online] Available at: https://www.alternativeprojections.com/oral-histories/sky-david/ [Accessed 20 Oct. 2025].
Lynn Tomlinson is an award-winning director and animator, and Professor at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Known for her unique clay on glass technique, she animates moving clay paintings full of fluid transformations, exploring environmental themes, and often imagining how non-humans might view humanity’s social and environmental impact. Her research interests include tactility and expanded animation, such as fulldome immersive media, and performance and animation. Her short films have been screened at MoMA, The National Gallery, The Pompidou Center, and at international film and animation festivals including Annecy, Ann Arbor, and Ottawa. She received the 2022 Baker Art Award for Film/Video, and the 2021 Edison Innovation Award from the Thomas Edison (Black Maria) Film Festival for her body of work, as well as the Independent Artist Awards from the state arts councils of Maryland, Florida, and Pennsylvania.