Priit Pärn

Priit Pärn (1946) has been active as a caricaturist and illustrator since the late 1960s. He has illustrated around 40 children’s books in Estonia and Finland. His comic book Backwards (Tagurpidi) has been published not only in Estonia, but also in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Spain. Since the early 1980s, he has worked as a graphic artist. He has held at least 40 solo exhibitions in European countries and in Canada. In 2007, he held a solo exhibition at Kumu Art Museum.

Since 1990, Priit Pärn has worked as a lecturer. He has taught at film schools in Finland, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Japan, Canada, Australia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Ireland and England. In 1994, he founded the animation department at the Turku Arts Academy (Finland) and served as its artistic director until 2007. In 2003, Priit Pärn and his students were awarded the title of Best Animation School at the Ottawa Festival. In 2006, he founded the animation department at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where he worked as head of department and professor until 2019. The department has produced a generation of internationally recognised young animators from Estonia and abroad. His students have won at least 140 awards at international film festivals. In the 2020/2021 academic year, Pärn was a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Tartu.

Priit Pärn has created 14 longer animated films and several short-form works as a screenwriter, artist, and director. His films have won more than 80 awards at prestigious A-list animation festivals around the world. He has received 12 lifetime achievement awards from major international film festivals and from ASIFA, and his work has been featured in more than 60 retrospectives at festivals, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1989, Priit Pärn received the Oskar Luts Humour Prize, and in 2002 the Kristjan Raud Award. He was awarded the Order of the White Star, III Class, in 1999, and the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 2003. In 2023, Priit Pärn received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Culture.