Alexander Gorelick

Alex earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the Merit Scholarship. With the guidance of Chris Sullivan and Nancy Andrews, Alex pursued Stop-Motion Animation: A technique where inanimate objects are given the appearance of natural motion through a series of small position changes. He received a James Nelson Raymond Graduate Fellowship for his thesis film. Influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alex's first stop-motion film Wolves at the Table won Best Animation at the Knoxville Valleyfest Film Festival and Best Experimental Film at the L.A. Indie Talent Awards. Over the years he has directed animation for numerous projects including Walt Disney's Annie award nominated JoJo's Circus (2003) and Teletoon's Gemini award winning series Life's a Zoo (2008). With the production support of Canada's Cuppa Coffee Studios, Alex directed and animated The Devil's Due (2011), a surreal short noteworthy for its use of a continuously moving camera. The film features a choreographed overlap of more than seventy characters. It is rife with in-camera special effects. The world premier screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. It garnered a Gold Remi Award at Houston's International Film Festival for best independent animated short film. Alex is married to CG Supervisor/Actress Mahsa Ghorbankarimi. In 2015 the couple produced their first feature Luciferous (2015). The art-house thriller won a number of Best Horror Feature awards. Alex and Mahsa's daughter Mina Gorelick joined the film industry in 2013 voicing two Sesame Street short films. Her adept performance in Luciferous, earned Mina a Special Jury Award at the Torremolinos International Film Festival, in Spain. Alex was born in the former Soviet Union. His family immigrated to Canada in 1979 by way of Italy when he was six. Originally from Belarus, his father Lev Gorelick was a chef, his mother Klara a dentist. His sister Irena is a teacher. As a young athlete Alex ran competitive cross-country and was goaltender for the Windsor Nationals. At sixteen he competed in Chicago at the North American Maccabi Youth Olympic Games for one of Canada's basketball-team delegations. He was valedictorian at Vincent Massey high school and upon graduation received a number of Academic-Athletic bursaries. In 1996 Alex earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Windsor, where he received a Board of Governors Medal for highest academic standing from the School of Visual Arts.