editorial board

Devon Douieb (Digital Communications Manager)

Devon Douieb is a Social Media Officer in the third sector. She works with digital communities, creates content and delivers digital communications strategies. Devon completed an MA in Film Studies at King’s College London in 2017, where she was taught by fantasy-animation.org co-founder Dr Christopher Holliday. Her studies primarily focused on the representation of race and gender in popular cinema. Devon has worked in Disneyland Paris as a cast member, and her interest in Disney has expanded into a broader range of fantasy and animation (largely as a result of listening to the Fantasy/Animation podcast). As Digital Communications Manager, she’s looking forward to engaging with our digital communities, promoting our content as well as working on media opportunities. 

Fern Parsons (Digital Communications Manager)

Fern Parsons is an MA Film Studies graduate from the University of Southampton, having previously obtained a Film Studies degree from the University of Winchester. During her studies her research interests varied from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth to Bong Joon-ho’s Okja. Her MA dissertation was a star study on Jeff Goldblum entitled “The Blumaissance: Jeff Goldblum’s career renaissance” in which she seeked to explore how internet culture has transformed Goldblum’s star status. When she is not searching for the latest Goldblum memes she can be found re-watching her favourite Studio Ghibli movies, her love of them even extends to a tattoo of Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Dr. Aga J. Drenda (Books Editor)

Dr. Aga J. Drenda is a fantasy literature scholar who specialises in fantastic narratology and the contemporary fantasy genre. She holds a PhD in Fantasy Literature from Anglia Ruskin University (2017), an MA in Critical Methodologies from King’s College London (2007), and a BA in English Philology from University of Silesia (2006). Aga is a reviewer, editor, and a Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). She has previously taught Media, Popular Culture and Publishing at Middlesex University (2009–2019). Visit Aga’s academia website or follow her on Twitter.

Grace Han (Film & TV Editor)

Grace Han is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University, where she thinks about animation aesthetics. Her writing on repulsive TV will appear in The Encyclopedia for Animation Studies, vol. 4 (Bloomsbury 2025). On the side, she serves as the Film/TV Reviews Editor for Fantasy/Animation, and has published in Hyperallergic, Cineuropa, Asian Movie Pulse, and more as a Tomatometer-approved critic. Prior to coming to Stanford, she received the Maureen Furniss Award for Best Student Paper on Animated Media (2019) for an essay on melodrama.

Juliana Varela (Events Editor)

Juliana Varela is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is interested in the relationship between new viewing practices and animation, as well as the cultural and political potential of adult animation. She has contributed writing editorials and film reviews for Fantasy/Animation, where she is currently an Events Editor. Her work will be featured in a forthcoming edited collection on the animated television series BoJack Horseman.

Hrithvika (UX Designer)

Hrithvika is a UX designer and researcher with an interest in politics, social media, and design. After her BA in Liberal Arts from King's College London, she will be pursuing an MA in Internet Equalities at University of the Arts, London

peer reviewers

Dr. Amy Davis (University of Hull)

Dr. Amy M. Davis is a lecturer in Film Studies/Screen at the University of Hull. She specialises in the history of all things Disney, as well as American Animation History. She is the author of Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation (John Libbey & Co., 2006) and Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in Disney’s Feature Animation (John Libbey, 2013), and is the editor of Discussing Disney (John Libbey Publishing, 2019). She has published numerous academic & journalistic articles on Disney, including “The ‘Dark Prince’ and Dream Women: Walt Disney and Mid-Twentieth Century American Feminism” (HJFRT, 2005). She appears frequently on various podcasts and radio programmes, and is (rightly) known for knowing/thinking more about Disney than is probably healthy (but does think about other subjects, too, now and then). She is on the editorial board of animation: an interdisciplinary journal and Fantasy-Animation.org.

Julie Watkins (University of Greenwich)

Julie started her career as a motion graphic designer and animator at Spitfire Television, which was owned by the founder of Molinare. Over the next 20 years she went on to work as lead creative in motion graphics and visual effects for a number of prestigious post-production facilities in Soho and later in Manhattan. She designed concepts and storyboards and was in charge of technical direction and shoot supervision, leading animation teams, creating motion graphics and visual effects for commercials, broadcast graphics, music videos and films. She began teaching Advanced Flint/Flame part-time at New York University whilst continuing to work in post-production. In 2006 she joined the University of Greenwich and set up and ran a film and television degree in partnership with the BBC. She has designed and delivered moving image courses for practice-led students of film, television, animation and digital-media. Her focus is on the ever-evolving relationship between new forms of moving image, new approaches and technologies and the creative industries. Julie's qualifications include: PhD Composing Visual Music from an Animator’s Perspective, FHEA Higher Education, MA in Graphic Design (Distinction), and BA(Hons) 3D Design.

Dr. Jane Batkin (University of Lincoln)

Jane Batkin is an animation film theorist and acting deputy head for the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. Her book Identity in Animation was published in 2017, and she has had various chapters published in edited collections on animation, the most recent being a piece on childhood wandering in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft, published in 2021. Jane is currently working on her latest book Childhood in Animated Film and Television.

Michael J.Meindl (Radford University)

Michael J. Meindl is an associate professor of media production and co-director of cinema and screen studies at Radford University. He has an MFA in dramatic media from the University of Georgia. He has presented at numerous regional, national, and international conferences. His research focuses on the use of, and the representation of, science and technology in media. He is the convener for the Society for Animation Studies’ Science, Technology, and Animation special interest group. His essay “You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boom: Jaws, MythBusters, Science, and the Legacy of the Blockbuster” will appear this spring in an edited collection celebrating the upcoming anniversary of Jaws. His co-authored piece “Mojo Rising: Critiquing Mass Media through Animation and Comics” will also appear shortly in an edited collection centered on X-Men: The Animated Series. He is currently focused on looking at Disney’s multiplane camera as an active “actor” in a complex network during the 1930s and 1940s, and is ABD in Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology Studies PhD program.

Dr. Nea Ehrlich (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

Dr. Nea Ehrlich is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. She completed her PhD in the Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh and was a Polonsky postdoctoral fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is the author of articles on realism, serious games, animation and documentary. Her research appears in Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in Documentary Film and Visual Resources, she is co-editor of Drawn from Life, the 2018 anthology about animated documentaries published by Edinburgh University Press. Her book, Animating Truth, on animated documentary and the virtualization of culture in the 21st century was published in 2021 by Edinburgh University Press. Her work on artificial aesthetics lies at the intersection of Contemporary Art, Film Studies, Animation, Digital Media Theory, Gaming and Epistemology. She is currently working on a project on art and robotics, focusing on AI and machine vision.