Evan Bode is an independent filmmaker, experimental animator, music composer, film editor, and arts educator. Their work has been celebrated at major film festivals across the United States and around the world.
Embracing colorful, theatrical, handcrafted / DIY modes of production, Evan’s short films merge live-action filmmaking with animation and original music. Their original style of storytelling breaks binaries through a playful mix of mediums, departing from realism and blurring the distinction between outer worlds and inner ones.
Evan, who uses any/all pronouns, approaches filmmaking as a personal language to disrupt socially constructed boxes and borders. Their antifascist parables explore themes related to queer gender identity, neurodivergence, and imaginative creative expression as resistance to oppressive norms.
About
In 2026, Bode’s short animated documentary Prison and Time was selected for NYT Op-Docs—the Emmy & Oscar-winning series of documentary shorts by independent filmmakers—and published in the New York Times.
Evan's first student film, Thine Own Self, gained national recognition in 2021 as a winner of the Gotham Institute’s Student Showcase sponsored by JetBlue and Focus Features, a success featured in Filmmaker Magazine. The film, a one-person, zero-budget project made in his basement during the COVID-19 pandemic, screened at major festivals worldwide, including Animafest Zagreb alongside the work of Academy Award-winning animators.
Bode’s next two student films, A Spot for Frog and Out of Frame, were met with similar acclaim, including a "Director's Choice Award" at Thomas Edison Film Festival’s 42nd edition and a screening at Outfest L.A.—the largest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world.
Evan graduated from Syracuse University with an MFA in Film in 2023, earning a Chancellor's Citation for Excellence in Graduate Research. In 2020, he graduated with honors from Colorado State University with a B.A. in Communication Studies and minors in Sociology, English, and Film Studies.
In addition to teaching college courses, workshops, and an intensive Summer Film Academy at Syracuse University, Bode has presented artist talks and guest lectures by special invitation at other schools, including Cornell University, Baltimore School for the Arts, the WQED Film Academy, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo,the Dignity for Children Foundation in Malaysia, DePauw University, and OCAD University in Toronto.
In 2024, Evan co-founded Teens with a Movie Camera, a unique community art project and filmmaking collaboration designed to nurture the creativity of underrepresented youth in the city of Syracuse, NY. TwMC’s collaborative films, edited by Bode, have screened publicly on the façade of the Everson Museum of Art, at the Film-Makers’ Coop in NYC, and in an interactive six-week exhibition at ArtRage Gallery. Across 4 cohorts, nearly 50 teens have participated in the project, which received a 2026 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
