Artist-IN-RESIDENCE
August 1-19, 2026
Tamara Finlay
Tamara Finlay is a stop-motion animator, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist based in Michigan. She is a 2024 Kresge Artist Fellow in Film & Animation whose work combines puppetry, miniature sets, and experimental animation techniques to explore folklore, memory, and personal narrative. Drawing from her Ukrainian heritage and family history, Finlay creates richly textured animated worlds that blend humor, myth, and autobiographical storytelling. Her projects include The Baba Show, a stop-motion series inspired by her bold Ukrainian grandmother, and Baba Yaga’s Beastiary, an animated folklore series exploring creatures from Slavic mythology. In addition to filmmaking, she works as a fabricator, voice performer, and musician, bringing a wide range of handmade and performative elements into her films.
Artist Statement
During my residency at Good Hart, I plan to develop and begin production on the second episode of my stop-motion folklore series Baba Yaga’s Beastiary, titled “Mavka.”
The Beastiary series explores figures from Slavic folklore through a blend of stop-motion puppetry and experimental miniature techniques. In this episode, the forest spirit Mavka will be introduced through a hybrid visual language that combines a Victorian-style paper theatre and articulated paper puppets with a three-dimensional stop-motion narrator puppet, Baba Yaga, who presents each creature from her mysterious archive of folklore.
During the residency I plan to design and construct elements of the paper theatre, fabricate paper puppets, develop storyboards and animatic sequences, and begin filming test animation integrating the paper and dimensional worlds.
The natural landscape of northern Michigan is particularly meaningful for this project. The forests and shoreline of Lake Michigan evoke the atmosphere of the Carpathian Mountains that inform much of Slavic folklore. While in residence, I intend to gather visual reference material and record natural sound textures from the lake and surrounding forest to incorporate into the film’s soundscape.
The residency will allow me the uninterrupted time and environment needed to experiment with this hybrid animation approach and move the project into early production.