Nina Paley

Nina Paley is one of those creators I genuinely admire, because the work and the principles are inseparable. Sita Sings the Blues took the Ramayana and folded parallels from her own life into it, then she released the whole thing freely, putting her free-culture convictions where her art was. That's a rare kind of nerve. Coming up through comic strips like Nina's Adventures before moving into animation, and earning a Guggenheim along the way, she has the craft to back the philosophy. I'll always take an artist with a stance over a merely skilled one, and Paley gives you both at once.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Nina Paley

Name (Japanese)

ニナ・ペイリー

Reading

にな・ぺいりー

Born

May 3, 1968 (age 58)

Origin

Urbana, Illinois, United States

Occupation

film director / animator / cartoonist / screenwriter / writer

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Taurus / Monkey

High school

University Laboratory High School

University

University Laboratory High School

Awards & achievements

• Guggenheim Fellowship

Filmography / notable works

• Official sitehttps://ninapaley.com
• Xhttps://x.com/ninapaley
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina%20Paley
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%8A%E3%83%BB%E3%83%9A%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3341944

Tags

• Illinois
• film director
• animator
• cartoonist

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.