Animator Travis Van Alstyne has won the 2026 Vermont Prize. The South Burlington resident is the fifth annual recipient of the $5,000 prize, an award established by the Brattleboro Museum Art Center, Burlington City Arts, the Current gallery in Stowe and the Hall Art Foundation in Reading. Accordi ng to a press release, the prize “celebrates and supports the best visual art being made in Vermont today.” Responding to the honor, Van Alstyne, 45, said he is “super committed” to telling stories about Vermont’s people and places. After attending college in Georgia, he realized his “love and longing” for Vermont. Now, he spends his time researching, animating and producing short films centered on local narratives. One of those is a southern Vermont story that Van Alstyne, who grew up in Chester, learned as a teen. “Love of the Land,” his acclaimed 2024 short film, is about Romaine Tenney, an Ascutney farmer who died by suicide in 1964. Tenney’s farm was in the way of the planned route for Interstate 91, but he refused to give up his land, instead choosing to set his own barn and house on fire. Tenney died in the blaze. Van Alstyne called the farmer’s death a “very Vermont, very New England, very Yankee kind of story.” For his film, the animator wanted to focus on Tenney’s commitment to his land and shed light on “the idea of progress, which doesn’t always benefit everybody.” To bring a sense of authenticity to the film, Van Alstyne cast George Woodard, a dairy farmer from Waterbury Center, as the voice of Tenney. “I didn’t want to have someone putting on a Vermont accent,” Van Alstyne said. “I wanted someone that that’s how they spoke.” Poster for “Love of the Land” Credit: courtesy Instead of using freehand animation like most of his other projects, Van Alstyne used rotoscoping — tracing on top of videos — to better portray the somberness of the story. It was a time-consuming process: Van Alstyne had to film himself acting out Tenney’s motions in full farmer garb, then trace the video frame by frame. “Romaine didn’t have modern conveniences. He purposely chose to farm and do everything very manual,” Van Alstyne said. “I think I kind of honored that tradition by doing it by hand.” However, Van Alstyne said he’s “one and done with rotoscoping.” His current project returns to his freehand-animation roots. That film, “The Barnard Panther,” tells the story of the last confirmed mountain lion in Vermont in 1881. Van Alstyne said it’s likely that the mountain lion had traveled south to Barnard in search of a mate. The short film will follow that journey from the mountain lion’s perspective. Van Alstyne expects to complete it in 2028. The post Animator Travis Van Alstyne Wins 2026 Vermont Prize appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less