Masha Ellsworth is an award-winning Ukrainian-American animation director whose poetic visual language marries craft and code. A dual-degree artist educated in both computer science and fine art, Masha works at Pixar Animation Studios while also creating independent short films. Once based in Brooklyn and influenced by her home in northern Ukraine, her films weave the themes of identity, resilience, and cross-cultural storytelling.
Her latest short, Bound, which screens at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, reimagines a Ukrainian folk song as a visual narrative stitched in motion. Each frame is textured like a cross-stitched pattern. Her film not only animates but translates a centuries-old ballad into a visual embodiment of two collective emotional truths: the ache of missed connection and the lingering hope that fate might still find a way to stitch two paths back together. At HollyShorts, where innovation in short-form storytelling is celebrated, Bound offers a poignant fusion of ancestral craft and contemporary cinematic language.
“It always felt like there was a missing verse,” Masha reflects, referring to the traditional Ukrainian love song, “Іванко, ти Іванко” that forms the emotional and narrative backbone of Bound. “People meet and flirt… and then suddenly they’re upset. I wanted to tell the story between those lines.”
What emerges is not just a retelling but a reframing: a new syntax for a well-known story. The film follows Ivanko and Gala, two young lovers in 15th-century Ukraine. As the lyrics jump abruptly from romantic connection to misunderstanding, Masha threads a narrative that questions assumptions and challenges inherited interpretations.
“The traditional interpretation is that the girl stood him up,” she explains. “But when I looked at the text, there was no suggestion of that. I wanted to offer a more modern take.”
To do that, she reached into her cultural roots. Cross-stitch is a widely practiced Ukrainian folk art and has become more than a visual style choice. It became the medium through which new meaning could emerge. “I’m wearing a cross-stitched shirt today,” she smiles during our interview. “It’s a part of me. Like people have Hawaiian shirts, I have these.”
The hand-sewn texture not only honors tradition but births a metaphor. “When they meet, they catch each other’s strings. That came because I was thinking about threads and heartstrings,” she says. “It wasn’t in the original story…the medium informed it.”
Masha’s intuitive integration directs us towards something deeper: that the stories we believe in are shaped by how we tell them. In Masha’s work, animation is not just technique; it is language. And in the hands of an artist fluent in both code and culture, that language awakens emotional resonance and cultural memory.
Masha shared that she had long wanted to create a film based on Іванко, ти Іванко the folk song she grew up hearing throughout Ukraine. I asked her when the idea moved from intention to action. “I was already thinking about the song and the story for a while,” she told me, “but when the war started, it became clear that I had to make it. I needed to offer something beautiful that held our culture, especially in such a painful time.”
She offers that one of her favorite forms of knowledge that connects her to Ukraine is the kind passed down through families, which is what makes Bound uniquely personal. The process of making her film became a familial collaboration. Much of the visual development was done in partnership with her father, a classically trained architect and lifelong artistic role model. “It took me a while to find the courage to art direct him,” she admitted, laughing gently. “We had to find a language that was professional, even though we’re family. It didn’t go smoothly at first, but it became a beautiful experience.”
The creative courage to direct your own hero and to reinterpret a piece of your culture feels like a “crossing the threshold” moment. There is something I have been following across the artists I meet: the quiet bravery it takes to leave the known and make something deeply personal in the unknown. For Masha, that looked like redefining her relationship with her father, her culture, and the verse that the folk song left open for exploration.
Bound like the stitched blouses Masha wears, holds more than pattern or color. It holds memory. It holds voice. It holds the story we didn’t know we were missing. It reminds us that fluency in truthful language, whether visual, emotional, or ancestral, is not found but woven, thread by thread.
While Bound marks her second short, Masha is stitching her way toward long-form storytelling. “I want to create an animated series, one with a main storyline but also smaller stories in each episode. I also want to share more Ukrainian traditions. We have so many fascinating stories that are little known.”
Curious about how she thinks beyond visual form, I asked Masha if there are any non-cinematic disciplines that have influenced her animation work. Without hesitation, she brought up martial arts. “People who do martial arts know their bodies so well. Every movement is deliberate. I want to learn from that because animation is performance too”, she says. [It] is a craft you can study forever. It’s not just copying life. It’s distilling it.”
That performance-based awareness has her curious about Claymation next. “It’s so tactile. It reminds me of childhood, of playing with clay. There’s something joyful about it.”
As Bound continues its journey through festivals like HollyShorts, Masha’s work reminds us that stories can travel far. Rooted in tradition yet resonating globally, her film speaks to something we’ve all felt: the ache of what almost was, and the beauty of imagining what still could be. Perhaps, Bound calls us to trace the threads of our own stories, those we’ve inherited, those we’ve lost, and those we are just beginning to stitch together.
To learn more about Masha Ellsworth’s work and upcoming projects, visit Masha Makes Movies
