About Carmen
Carmen Morrow is a filmmaker, film and television editor and stop motion animator based in Los Angeles.As a filmmaker, her documentary The Dukha, combining live action and stop motion, has been exhibited at over 26 international film festivals including winning the "best documentary" award at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival.As a film editor, Carmen has worked on major streaming and theatrical productions for Apple TV+ and has editorial credits spanning prestige drama, independent film, and documentary. She is a member of IATSE Motion Picture Editors Guild Local 700 and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.As a passion and creative outlet, Carmen creates botanical animations using fresh flowers and organic materials, animated one frame at a time by hand. Artist’s Statement
Flowers choose me, different ones arriving with each season, deciding my palette before I do. Their color, shape, and texture come already perfected by something beyond my hand. As I animate, petals wilt and curl, some faster than others, and every frame becomes a negotiation with impermanence. A flower needs no translation. It is a language every living thing already knows. Our conversation with nature is endless. My hope is that my art brings us home to something we never really left.Why “Reindeer Spirit Studio” ?
In 2017, Carmen and her collaborator Zach Wolf traveled to Mongolia hoping to trace a shamanic link between reindeer herders and the origins of Santa Claus, only to find that the Dukha, a nomadic reindeer-herding community, had never heard of Santa at all. The myth they'd gone looking for wasn't there, so the project pivoted into The Dukha, a documentary short about the herders themselves, and the Instagram account built to document that journey kept its name: Reindeer Spirit Studio. What began as a place to share footage from Mongolia slowly transformed as Carmen's animation built from fresh flowers began finding an audience of its own, and the name stayed.
Carmen Morrow