George McBean

Refugees

Women's Rights

Political Revolution

Former UNICEF Head of Graphics George McBean  gave a workshop for students and hosted a Q&A about his life and work. In the video below he gives a tour of his retrospective, The Insurgent Artist, which was in The Glass Tank.
The exhibition programme can be downloaded here.

With conflicts, wars and crisis situations erupting all over the world, there are more people that try to escape, people looking for a safe haven. What are the challenges that they face? Will they always be strangers?
New Internationalist
migrant detention issue

Discrimination and violence against women is a social and political issue as well as, all too often, a physical and emotional one. We look at how women are treated in societies as diverse as Afghanistan and the USA.
New Internationalist
feminism issue

Featuring movies such as Syria Inside and The Fifth Estate, the final day of the festival aims to look at human rights from a governmental point of view. How do our leaders protect us? How do they threaten our security?
New Internationalist
politics articles

"Imagine a street artist who draws reasonable portraits and who gathers a crowd to watch him sketch… then ship this artist into a refugee camp in Somalia and ask him to draw the people he sees, doing things that will help them save their children’s lives. Crowds gather round and the artist’s skill suddenly becomes as important as medicine." George McBean.

George McBean is an animator and illustrator, born in Scotland in 1948. He retired as Head of UNICEF’s Graphic’s section dealing with Animation for Children’s Rights and continued working on occasional assignments in East Africa. His research into Visual Literacy among rural populations in Nepal has been highlighted in the New Internationalist and was described in the book 'People Pictures and Power’ as “the most important visual literacy study ever done”. He was key to forming one of UNICEF's most successful partnerships with more than 100 animation studios worldwide, including Disney, Pixar, Warner Bros, Dreamworks, Hanna Barbera, Cartoon Network. 

His designs and animated film productions have been distributed world-wide by the United Nations. He has given talks on his work at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and at the Animation Workshop in Viborg Denmark. 

The full 2015 Festival programme can be downloaded here.