Anya Shapira

Anya Shapira is visual communication designer and animator with work experience in diverse graphic design and (interactive) media projects. Her graphic design/art education started in St. Petersburg, Russia. In secondary school with art specialization she learned the basics of painting, drawing and composition. After finishing art school she moved with her family to Israel. Graphic design became her professional choice and she completed four years education in graphic design college. After two years of working at graphic design office she decided to broaden her specialization. International course for new media in Media GN, branch of Minerva Academy, Groningen gave her an opportunity to get acquainted with the basics of interactive multimedia and computer animation. Five month long course was completed with the project that consists of 3D animation and interactive elements. After finishing the course Anya decided to stay in the Netherlands and continued her education at Design Academy Eindhoven. Part time studies were combined with work as media designer at design office in Eindhoven. Anya was graduated from Design Academy with interactive installation project. The main goal of this project was to demonstrate how people could interact with virtual environment without using conventional interaction means like keyboard and mouse. Gesture based interface of the installation showed the possibilities for developing intuitive, emotionally loaded interaction between humans and computers. This project was nominated for Milky Way price, an academic price of Design Academy and later received price at Top Talent Award, European context for new media students and young professionals. After that Anya worked few years as graphic and media designer at design offices in the Netherlands, later as freelancer. Animations stayed her man source of fascination. Parallel to that Anya was following the developments in the field of interactive installations. In a search for the ways to develop her ideas about animation and interactivity Anya joined Masters of Animations at St. Joost, Breda. Her graduation project investigates the ways animation can support intuitive interaction between humans and computers.
Looking for different unconventional ways to interact with virtual environment is not just a short-term trend in modern art and design. As technology becomes more invisible, embedded in our everyday surroundings, grows the interest towards new kinds of interfaces. More human oriented, intuitive interaction can provide completely different kind of experience than the one achieved by using keyboard and mouse. It seems that future ways to communicate with computers lies beyond these devices.
Although many Anya's works lay on a border between art and design she considers herself more as a designer than an artist. Her vision of an artist is of someone who is focused primary on expressing his creativity in his own very specific ways of expression, which makes is often difficult to concentrate on client's needs. Anya is someone who works more client-oriented. Her opinion is that combining artistic vision with client's request can bring the most interesting results.
Broad education and work experience created a combination of skills that allow Anya to understand deeply the needs of the client and to come up with interesting solutions for creative assignments. Reach cultural background helps to understand human nature in general. In her works Anya strives first of all to touch people on emotional level. Finding the ways to create emotional experience is her main goal in any project. Experiment plays huge role in her creative process. Mixing different kinds of media and techniques brings the most surprising results.