A closeup of Dairys Escoto De León in a black leather jacket
Faculty

Animation (BFA)

Dairys Escoto De León is a mixed-media animator and illustrator who focuses on whimsical iterations of paper cut-out stop motion, claymation, 2-D hand-drawn animation, and motion graphics. As an AICAD (Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design) Teaching Fellow, she is teaching in the Animation program at UArts for a second year and is focusing on character design, VFX, 2-D animation, and motion design.

Biography

Escoto De León was born in the Dominican Republic and has lived in New York City, Georgia, Rhode Island, and most recently, California, for the past 15 years. She earned her BFA in Film/Video and Animation from Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and then completed her Master of Fine Arts in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts in 2022. Currently, she lives in West Philadelphia with her plants and two cats.

Experience

  • Throughout the course of her education career, Escoto De León worked with Mighty Oak Studio on stop motion and hand-drawn animation, most notably on Amazon Prime’s Mary J Blige documentary, My Life

  • She then produced two children’s music videos for Nearpod’s Flocabulary, lighting up classrooms with musical stop-motion, mixed-media stories, as well as numerous commercials independently and beside studios in Los Angeles. 

  • Escoto De León’s personal films have toured in festivals including San Diego Underground Film Festival in 2020 and Redcat Film Showcase Festival in 2022. 

  • She is producing an indie music video, tackling grants, and making a film for a theater production in San Francisco. 

View Dairys Escoto De León’s portfolio.

Follow her on Instagram: @dairys-escoto

A still of a paper cutout stop motion animation depicting woman looking sadly at a body of water in a forest