About

Sarah Rae Franklin is a Portland-based, award-winning, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice centers animation, illustration, and creative writing; she also experiments in sound and painting. She was born and raised in the rural Puget Sound area before moving to Portland to pursue a degree in animation at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Franklin had her first solo show at the Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network in 2018 and has been featured in several other shows throughout the Pacific Northwest, including a recent show with Portland’5 Culture & Community. Her animated work has been screened at multiple film festivals in and out of the United States, most notably by Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow and Portland Panorama.

Do you not long, in the dark of the night, to look through the glowing window of your neighbor? To understand the mystery of the other? To see how the song of your heart echoes in theirs? Sarah Rae Franklin is an artist whose work gives a glimpse into the experiences of the “other”. He shows the beauty and the pain– how inextricably they are. How the transgressive provides a foundation for a new form of empathy. Franklin harnesses both levity and grimness and integrates them to get at the undiscussed truths of life. Her work explores traditionally taboo experiences and identities such as queerness, disability, trauma, and violence. These are harnessed through an illustrative lens that embraces the cultural prevalence of cartoons and their importance to emotional storytelling. She creates windows into difficult subjects for her audiences, expanding understanding of underrepresented subject matters for a greater audience. Lone Buck Motel, his junior film, is a love letter to 80’s queer monster movies, rural motels, and cruising culture. Once, a Second Time, her thesis and most recent film, harness the imagery of the salmon to explore improved depictions of recovering from the trauma of a suicide attempt in film. Both of these films have screened internationally and have won awards at some of the countless festivals they have been featured in. His first film out of art school, A Beautiful Song, is currently in pre-production.