KAETI LEILA MACNEIL





INDEPENDENT ARTIST & ANIMATOR
kaeti@kaetimacneil.com
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Kaeti MacNeil is an American artist working at the intersection of painting and animation. Her practice focuses on how perception, memory, and embodied sensation take visual form over time, often translating immaterial or temporal experience into spatial images. Drawing from art history, cognitive science, and process philosophy, her work investigates the emergence of individual personality, self-awareness, and human intelligence.

Her animated film Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions (2022) received Best Animated Short at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in New York City. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Aga Khan Museum. She serves as an Advisor to the SPARKS Community Cohort at the Center for Process Studies and is a Luminary with Science New Wave.



CONTACT



Topology of Sensate Images
Online exhibition, New Art City

C.V. 





Education
2025
Certificate in Process Thought & Practice
Center for Process Studies / Cobb Institute

2022
BFA with Distinction
OCAD University, Toronto
Drawing & Painting: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation

2010
AA, Graphic Design & Illustration
Madison Area Technical College




Appointments & Talks
2026 (forthcoming)
Works in Process, Lightning Talk
18th Triennial Symposium: All Too Human

2025
Carasoul: Animating the Imaginal Mind
SPARKS Exchange, Center for Process Studies

2025–present
Advisor, SPARKS Community Cohort
Center for Process Studies

2023–present
Luminary, Science New Wave




Film Festivals & Screenings 2026 (forthcoming)
Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

18th Triennial Symposium: All Too Human
Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, Connecticut College

2024
Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

25th Dawson City International Short Film Festival
Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Yukon

2022
Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image, Dolby Cinema, New York City
(Best Animated Short)

Salon des Refusés, Ottawa International Animation Festival
SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario

Mindfield Film Festival
Guild Cinema, Albuquerque, New Mexico





Selected Exhibitions 2025–26
Local Perspectives
Smyrna Community Center and City Hall, Georgia

2024
Light Up the Dark
Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

2023
Dreams
Heart Soul and Art, Marietta, Georgia

2022
GradEx 107
OCAD University, Toronto




Awards Best Animated Short
Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image, New York City
2022

Portfolio of Merit
Madison Area Technical College
2010




Writing & Press
2024
Carasoul: The Imaginal Mind,” Novel Becomings

2023
Animating the Hallucinogenie,” Labocine





Download Full CV (PDF)



Last Updated 24.10.31
SELECTED WORK







1.    Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions
Animated short film, 2:30  
2022

Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions is an animated surrealist short that depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. Grounded in biological and biographical forms, the film presents inner experience as something that surrounds the body like waves and fields, invisible yet tangible.

The Carasoul refers to the head-soul, the imagination or mind’s eye, moving around the body and shaping how time, consciousness, and the imaginal mind are experienced. Moving between abstraction and figuration, the film uses hand-painted stop-motion and digital animation to give form to unseen dimensions of human experience.





2.    Lucid Prism
Light Up the Dark
Projection Mapped Animation, 2024
Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

This work was commissioned in dialogue with the exhibition Light: Visionary Perspectives. My piece is like visual music, a synesthetic experience of synchronized sound and visuals of the Light of the Eye, the Light of the Mind, and the Light of the Heart. These arise as brush stroke bursts, electric wavelengths, and veins of bioluminescence, bringing the surface of the museum to life.




3.    Holoeikon
mixed media on paper
18 x 11 inches
2024

Drawing from the Greek holos (whole) and eikon (image), each panel is conceived as a complete event, a whole reality encountered through any single part. Informed by process philosophy, the paintings treat the image as an event of becoming, where perception, awareness, and divinity concresce.





4.    Concrescendo
Animated video, 2:18
2025

In the process of becoming, lived experience crescendos into concrescence. In Whitehead’s terms, Concrescendo shows actual occasions coming together as moments remembered in Toronto are prehended into the present while playing Einaudi’s Experience on the piano. The remembered moments and the act of remembering merge, forming a concrescing subject shaped by both past and present.





5.    Works in Process
Studio notes, PDFs
2024-2025

This is an ongoing series of PDFs documenting my studio practice. These editions bring together in-progress animation frames, paintings, sketches, research notes, and reflections. These are shared as my ongoing e-newsletter.






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