Vanessa Cruz

Vanessa B. Cruz recently received for the third time, the prestigious Fulbright Award: first as a Scholar Award in 2012 in Media Arts, where she lived in Dublin, Ireland working with the National College of Art and Design, and gathering research for her projects, and second as a Specialist Award in 2014, teaching MFA and BFA students at the Fachhochschule St. Pölten, in St. Pölten Austria, and most recently a Specialist Award in 2022, working with GerHub in UB, Mongolia developing creative curriculum. Ms. Cruz completed a collaborated video projection project for the Jacksonville Symphony and the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Jacksonville. She attended The California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, where she earned her MFA and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005, she joined the University of North Florida faculty after working in the animation industry for over ten years.  She has worked for such studios as 20th Century Fox Television Animation, and Film Roman, as well as created her own independent films.  Her films have been shown internationally and she’s won awards at the Ottawa International Film Festival and Oslo Animation Festival. Ms. Cruz was also the curator for screenings at the REDCAT in Los Angeles, Santa Monica Museum of Art, as well as the Japanese American National Museum.  She has also received the 2008 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the State of Florida and in 2009 the UNF Summer Scholarship grant, which helped fund two films: “Icarus” and “Eve As a Young Child”. Ms. Cruz served as a panelist on the 2010 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the State of Florida for Media Arts, and in 2016 received the UNF COAS Dean Leadership Council Faculty Fellowship. She has served as a member of the Jacksonville Film Festival Board of Directors, as well as served as a Peer Reviewer for Fulbright Scholar Awards.