Catya Plate, born 1962 in Barcelona, Spain, is a Brooklyn based multi-award winning filmmaker and artist, working in sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and artist books. Raised in Germany, she attended the Werkkunstschule, Köln, before coming to New York in 1987 through a Fulbright Scholarship for post-graduate Fine Arts studies at the School of Visual Arts. She has been exhibiting regularly and internationally since the mid-1980's. Exhibitions in 2015 included a solo show at the Indianapolis Art Center and a group shows at The Drawing Center at the Lesley Heller Workspace Gallery in New York City. Her work can be found in many public and private collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City. Articles and reviews of Plate's films, exhibition and installation projects have appeared in Film Threat, The New York Times and The Independent, among many others. In 1996 she received an Artist in the Marketplace award from the Bronx Museum of the Arts and in 2008 her work was selected for permanent inclusion in the Art Base of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2009, she created Clothespin Freak Productions to bring her “Clothespin Freaks”characters to life through stop-motion animation short films. In 2012, her first film "The Reading", was awarded Best Animated Film at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival and received an Outstanding Achievement Award for Experimental Film at the Williamsburg International Film Festival. “Hanging By A Thread”, her second animated short film, won 9 awards including a Female Filmmaker Award for Outstanding Achievement at FrackFest, a Platinum Remi Award at the 48th Annual WorldFest Houston and two Awards of Excellence at the prestigious IndieFEST Film and Best Shorts Competition. It has screened in over 22 film festivals in the US and abroad, like the Academy Award-qualifying St. Louis International Film Festival. Catya has recently been added to the prestigious GREAT WOMEN ANIMATORS list and was a juror for animation and experimental film at the celebrated Brooklyn Film Festival. Catya continues exploring and developing her futuristic “Clothespin Freaks”universe through varied media. “Meeting MacGuffin: An Animated Ecological Thriller”, the animated sequel of “Hanging By A Thread” and second in a trilogy of animated shorts was completed in February 2017. Its World Premiere at a renowned film festival will be announced soon. The script for “Meeting MacGuffin” made it into the Quarter Finals (Top 40 Shorts) at the celebrated Cinequest Screenwriting Competition in 2015. "Speaking Of Freaks", a short documentary by filmmaker Hamad Altourah about the making of "Meeting MacGuffin" was released in November 2016.
