2039 Red Floor Gallery Excellence in Illustration & Intersectional Education

Ana recently won the Red Floor Gallery award for Excellence in Illustration & Intersectional Education. She was nominated for her work in creating a VR environment of the lungs in conjuction with her series of posters of humorous depictions of different cells in the body.

In this page, you can find a transcript of the interview that Ana read during the Red Floor Gallery award ceremony.

Hello to my friends, family, and supporters,

For the past 20 years, I’ve been working on inspiring curiosity about the sciences through art. But, of course, inspiring curiosity isn’t enough. Part of my mission was to create inspiring works, yes, but also to have a high academic standard for these works. I believe that humor and interesting design can allow for this to be accomplished. Therefore, I am honored to receive the Excellence in Illustration & Intersectional Education award.

This project truly pushed me to aggregate skills that I did not have before, such as creating environments in VR and even a website. However, I think the most important part of this journey was pushing me to seek out people in the industry who would be interested in giving me and my ideas a chance.

On that note, I would like to thank Han for giving me an important piece of feedback- put yourself outside of the academy. Of course, this advice was given to me 20 years ago, but it led to the important meeting with Kees, head of Life Sciences in EUC. He provided me with feedback from someone in the education industry, and allowed me to make a professional connection in the field. I would also like to thank Brigitte and Ces for their technical help and clarification on the project. I was able to understand that it was less about speculating about the future, and more about placing myself in that future.

I would like to acknowledge my inspirations for this project as well. To begin with, Goro Fujita has made me want to pursue VR art for years, and I am glad this allowed me to do so finally. The life he gives to his tableaus through pleasing colours, an incredible sense of spacing and perspective, and a soothing animation style has been a great sense of inspiration. I also took a lot of inspiration from the In a Nutshell videos, which do not sacrifice scientific rigor for charming design and, of course, humor.

Thanks to this grant, in the future I would like to be able to provide students of all ages with a variety of other learning resources, including a line of Physiology VR environments and education posters. I am a strong believer that these can have real value, even in helping people study for exams. Exploring other ways of learning is extremely important, and inspiring a passion for the life sciences without fear will continue to be my mission.

Thank you all for this great honor.