Eva Louise Hall Receives Creative Capital Grant for Stop-Motion Horror Film “Pluck”
01.12.2026
Creative Capital recently awarded $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists, including Hall, Assistant Professor and Chair of Animation at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has provided $55 million in grants and services to individual artists across the United States.
Creative Capital Grant
The public announcement comes as Eva Louise Hall (’12 Animation) begins editing the teaser trailer for her upcoming stop-motion film, Pluck. While her work on the preview may suggest the animation is nearly finished, Hall emphasizes that the project is unfolding on a longer timeline, with the $50,000 Creative Capital grant supporting its development and eventual completion over several years.
“They look for artists with ambitious projects, someone they can collaborate with over a longer period, beyond just six months or a year. For someone like me, who works with a particularly laborious process, this kind of support makes a project like this feasible,” said Hall, Assistant Professor and Chair of Animation.
For her previous film, Mira, Hall worked alone, chipping away at the filmmaking process during nights and weekends over the course of three years (“a one-woman circus,” she says). For Pluck, she estimates it would take five years to complete if she were to work the same way.
But this time she’s not alone.
"For someone like me, who works with a particularly laborious process, this kind of support makes a project like this feasible."
The Creative Capital grant now gives her the flexibility to hire a small team of artists, enabling a hopeful two-year timeline for completion. “We’re only a percentage of the way through filming,” Hall says, “and then there’s finishing the film and getting it onto the festival circuit.”
“We have quite a few graduates who are still in the area, so I’ve been talking with them about fabrication and having them start this summer, working with me full time to carve out a large portion of the film in terms of filming and animation,” she said.
Pluck is a stop-motion surrealist horror short that follows Amaia, a talented athlete at the height of her career, as she struggles to conceal a horrifying terminal diagnosis that grotesquely starts mutating her body into that of a chicken. The film is being created using physical sets, animated puppetry, and experimental media, all handcrafted frame by frame.
Hall describes the project as her most technically ambitious to date. She completed the script in 2025, with production beginning that fall after receiving a Teri Rogers Film Grant from ArtsKC and the Kansas City Film Office, which supported the project’s early expenses.
Now, the 2026 Creative Capital Award will help ensure the project’s completion. Renowned for supporting original and ambitious proposals, the non-profit provides artists with up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, along with professional development services and community-building opportunities to foster risk-taking, groundbreaking work.
“They have a great history of working with experimental and indie animators,” Hall explained. “And they’ve supported some really, really impressive prestigious projects.”
Image: Still from Pluck, provided by Eva Louise Hall
Founded in 1999, after the U.S. Congress pressured the National Endowment for the Arts to discontinue grants to individual artists, Creative Capital is the only national, open-call grant program dedicated to supporting artists creating new work across all disciplines, with a strong focus on uplifting individual artists and preserving artistic freedom.
Today, they are a leading source of individual artist grants in New York and across the United States, awarding approximately 45–55 artists each year with Creative Capital Awards.
Empathetic Horror
As a woman working in animated horror, Hall says she is drawn to exploring how her work can inspire empathy and understanding of others in ways that are both distinctive and visually striking.
“With my last film, Mira, I used body horror to explore themes of losing oneself through the abuse of others. With Pluck, I intend to further study this subgenre as it relates to fears of losing bodily autonomy, facing terminal illness, and experiencing suffering,” she said.
Pluck will also serve as a cautionary tale about the risks of tying one’s sense of purpose too closely to career and ambition. By confronting the dark and horrific, Hall hopes the film will broaden our understanding and deepen our capacity to foster beauty and kindness.
“As a woman with a significant chance of experiencing terminal illness due to my family history, I want to advocate for bodily autonomy at all stages of life, a political and human issue that feels increasingly pertinent in our current political climate,” she said.
The artists receiving the 2026 Creative Capital Award and 2026 State of the Art Prize were selected from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States via a democratic, national open call. Project proposals were evaluated through an external review process that included 107 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers, and artists, and culminated in discipline-specific final panels.