About the illustrator

Lev Polyakov is an award winning independent animation director and conceptual artist, whose films were featured on WNET 13, Channel Frederator, and ShortsHD.

Lev Polyakov has been active in the animation world since 2004, starting as an intern for Signe Baumane, one of New York's most prominent independent animators, and proceeding to write and direct his own animated films. His first short, Piper the Goat and the Peace Pipe, won the first place at the 2005 Ottawa Animation Festival. For his next film, Morning, Day, Evening, Night… and Morning Again, Lev was awarded a grant and an honorary membership from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. During his junior year at School of Visual Arts, Lev directed and produced Only Love, a 15-minute animated short that premiered at the prestigious Woodstock Film Festival, and has been shown at more than 30 film festivals around the world, winning several first place awards.

Lev has done visually appealing, character-driven commercial work such as storyboarding, character design, and animation for an iPad movie-book Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood, produced by Giants Are Small in partnership with Universal Music; and for the virtual reality studio, The Glimpse Group.

Lev is currently the Chair of the Art and Technology Committee at the National Arts Club in New York City.