Joan Ashworth is an artist/filmmaker specialising in animation.
Ashworth primarily works with narrative and has adapted existing work as well as writing original scripts. Her research interests are in narrative, visual writing, texture, transformation and developing tools for animation, both digital and analogue. She has lectured in the UK and internationally on visual writing, and on her own work.
She is currently researching three films on the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who is a graduate of the Royal College of Art.
Ashworth studied at the National Film and Television School where she worked with documentary, live action and animation, graduating in 1987 with her short film The Web based on Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. The Web was shown at film festivals worldwide, winning the Mari Kuttna Prize for Best British Animation (1987), and was broadcast on Channel 4.
After graduating, Ashworth cofounded 3 Peach Animation, through which she shot the black-and-white dream sequence for Nick Park’s A Grand Day Out, and directed many commercials, title sequences and stings for TV and cinema, including the opening titles for Tim Burton's Batman, and stings for Christmas on BBC1 and 2. Ashworth joined the RCA in 1994, becoming Professor of Animation in 1998.
Since joining the RCA, Ashworth set up a production company, Seed Fold Films, through which she completed a 10-minute film How Mermaids Breed inspired by Bronze Age Cycladic fertility figures, the drawings of Henry Moore and Birling Gap Beach, Sussex. How Mermaids Breed has been screened widely at international film festivals, winning several prizes including Best Narrative in Estonia, and a prize for Poignant Inversion of Myth in Fantoche, Switzerland.
In 2010 Ashworth completed the short animated film Mushroom Thief. The film was shot on location in a lush, green meadow in the Trough of Bowland, Lancashire, and involved two young actors from the local area. Mushroom Thief screened as part of 'The Lost Objects of Childhood' programme, curated by Deborah Levy for Animac Festival, Barcelona and San Sebastian, Spain, and was screened in a competition at Message to Man Festival, St Petersburg, Russia, in July 2010.