Ruth Hayes animates in film, video and pre-cinema formats such as flipbooks, zoetropes and praxinoscopes, taking essayistic approaches to autobiography, history, social issues and visual experience.

Her cameraless animation works, Copper Perforation Loop Triptych and Perilous Experiment (2016), and Amulet (2022) play with materiality and chance occurrences in crafting and projection. In 2013 she produced Super Moon Sand Photograms, derived from loops of raw film stock exposed by moonlight on the Olympic Coast. She hand-processed the loops, and projected them in performances in Olympia and Albuquerque.  Ruth’s 2011 video of animated photographic imagery, On Our Way, is a phenomenological meditation on contrasts between wild and settled landscapes in western Washington State. Her Reign of the Dog: A Re-Visionist History (1994) deconstructed the history of the conquest of the Americas.  Wanda (1990), a story of feline and feminine desire, was included in the BFI’s Desire & Sexuality; Animating the Unconscious compilation, and has screened and toured internationally. Ruth’s flipbooks were featured in “Daumenkino: The Flipbook Show” at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (2005) and are in library collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Washington, among others. Her most recent film, Hemorrhage (2023) is a work of agit-prop in response to the overturning of Roe and the evisceration of women’s rights to choose.

Ruth came  to animation through drawing and printmaking, studying with Eric Martin, Mary Beams and George Griffin before earning her BA at Harvard-Radcliffe in 1978. Moving to Seattle in 1979, she began to publish flipbooks as an alternate means of distribution. With $50 won in the Portland Animation Collective’s First International Zoetrope Competition, she made her own zoetrope, using it to develop new sequences for flipbooks and to teach animation to children through the Washington State Arts Commission’s Artist in Residence Program. After years freelancing and working for The Real Comet Press, Ruth entered the Experimental Animation program at California Institute of the Arts, earning her MFA in 1992. She continued to teach youth in the Seattle Public Schools, Washington juvenile justice institutions and the California State Summer School for the Arts, eventually joining the Evergreen faculty where she taught from 1997 to 2022. While at Evergreen, she focused on teaching animation in broadly interdisciplinary thematic courses  that, depending on the year, examined and applied animation techniques in the context of media literacy and media studies, the visual arts, history, literature and the sciences.