Andrea Dorfman

Andrea Dorfman is a Halifax-based filmmaker, artist, writer, animator, illustrator, bicyclist, seed grower, star gazer and people watcher. She is endlessly curious about all sorts of things, but the only thing she knows for sure is that she knows almost nothing at all. She has directed numerous shorts and the feature films Parsley Days (2000), Love That Boy (2003),  Heartbeat (2014) and Spinster (2020), often collaborating with the brilliant writer Jennifer Deyell. At some point along the way, Dorfman taught herself animation and made the Emmy-nominated  Flawed (2009) and Big Mouth (2012) with the National Film Board of Canada, as well as the feature doc The Girls of Meru (2018), which follows the human rights work of Canadian legal justice non-profit the equality effect. In 2017, she adapted and illustrated Flawed, which was published as a YA graphic memoir for Firefly Books.

Dorfman’s short live-action/animation collaboration with uber-talented poet-musician Tanya Davis, How to Be Alone (2010), has garnered almost 10 million YouTube hits and was adapted into a book published by HarperCollins, illustrated by Dorfman. Their follow-up, the animated film How to Be at Home, made during the first COVID lockdown, is a deeply soothing comfort in pandemical times. Social media-avoidant (but curious), Dorfman has experimented with Instagram, posting Tiny Weekly Memoirs throughout 2020. “It was an interesting art project,” she mused, “but ultimately social media is not for me.” These days, she is in production on her animated short Hairy Legs, also produced by the NFB. She lives with her partner Dave, his son Max and occasionally his daughter Sydney, their dog Sophie, and cats Archer and Frankie.