Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire
Ireland’s campus for the Creative Industries

Keelin Kusch 

BA [Hons] Animation

Keelin is a background and layout artist who has a passion for colour and design. They love bringing their own worlds to life, but they also love collaborating with others to bring their visions to life. This year they created backgrounds and layouts for seven of their classmates films along with colourscripts for a few of them. While working on their own personal project centered around Mai the witch. They dabbled in compositing this year which they found a new love for.

Background and Layout Artist

Keelin has been specialising as a background and layout artist, they have worked across seven of their classmates films during the year. They enjoyed the variety of styles they got to work in. They also developed a few of their own projects on the side mainly focusing on their witch project. They developed the look and feel of the world, its stories and characters before bringing it all together by painting backgrounds that illustrate the many locations in the project.



The Occult, the Body and Gender: Representations of Gender in Horror

Keelin's thesis ‘The Occult, the Body and Gender: Representations of Gender in Horror’ analyses the representation of women in Horror Films as they navigate women's issues such as puberty, pregnancy, and rape across the genres of the occult, body horror and therape/revenge film. They
analyse these films by looking at how they fit into and adapt the tropes found within their genre of film and how the films depict and discuss sensitive issues for women. They examine the criticism given to such films by Creed and Clover during the 90s and look at how modern horror films stand to the criticisms given by them. They also examine the films in relation to texts from modern feminist critics such as Pisters and Harrington. To conclude they discuss how female directors are shifting the primary viewer of horror from the male to the female through their cathartic telling's of women’s experiences. They also examine how they are redefining the narrative of these genres to frame the stories and the female characters in a more positive and feminist light.