Storybook Apocalypse:
A Live Screening and Q&A with Gina Napolitan
May 2, 2021

STORYBOOK APOCALYPSE is a toy theater/expanded cinema hybrid performance that uses animation and live-feed video to tell the story of a child who decides to stow away on a merchant ship. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson-style “boys’ adventure” stories, the piece aims to turn this classic template inside-out, building an ungendered, introspective story focused on the interior life of a fictional runaway child.

Gina Marie Napolitan is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work encompasses animation, experimental film practices, painting, collage, and printmaking. Raised in the Boston area, where everything seems to buckle under the weight of its own history, Gina draws endless inspiration from our collective cultural memory and the unreliability of our perception of the past. Her work is populated by distorted miniatures, found objects, murky houses, and smudgy, nameless ghosts. She’s won awards, received artist residencies, shown work in galleries, and screened at film festivals, but she spends most of her free time working as an art educator with Echo Park Film Center and adjunct professor at CSU Long Beach. Gina received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her MFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts.