With more than thirty years in the animation world, Ukulele Pictures LLC (Laura Margulies) has an extensive body of personal and professional work. Each animation is hand painted and fills the screen with color, depth, texture, motion and emotion.

Laura began animating in 1988 as a means to combine her love of dance and painting.  Animation has continued to inspire Laura, who has spent over thirty years exploring paint in motion.  Laura hand animates using paints in a “stop motion” style. Her 2D animated films sometimes combine digital animation with and hand drawn techniques using ink, pencil, watercolors. She uses both narrative and experimental methods of storytelling and often combines animation with live action.  Her personal films have been screened worldwide in film festivals (Sundance, Ann Arbor, Margaret Mead, Anima Munde, Asifa, New York Children’s Film Festival, and Cardiff International Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, Honolulu Museum of Art, etc) and her commissioned work has aired nationwide on television (PBS, CBS, MTV, VH1, Sundance Channel etc.).  She has received awards and grants from Cinedance Film Festival, Broadcast Design, Asifa East, Ann Arbor, and Creativity Magazine, New York University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Dance Films Association, The PEW Charitable Funds.  Her work in progress “Local Kine Academy Leader” showed at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Artists of Hawaii show in 2011.  She continues to work on this film. Besides creating her own films, Laura has worked as a designer and colorist at MTV Animation on the cult classics “The Head”, “Beavis and Butthead” and “Daria” and as a freelance illustrator, animator and artist. Recently Laura created work and supervised the animations for a collaborative performance project “Symphony of The Hawaiian Birds” that was seen by over 10,000 school age children. Laura has taught animation at Pratt, New York Film Academy, School of Visual Arts, Punahou School, I’olani School, Hawaii Women in Filmmaking and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she taught for thirteen years.   She currently teaches at the University of Hawaii's Academy of Creative Media.  Laura has a BA from the University of Hawaii and an MFA in animation from NYU.