The Edison Innovation Award is presented each year to a filmmaker who has a distinguished body of work that advances the mission and legacy of the Thomas Edison Film Festival and demonstrates significant recognition, past and present. The filmmaker recognized is also prominent in the community of independent filmmaker/artists and is recognized as a pioneer in new forms and innovations in filmmaking.

Lynn Tomlinson animates moving clay paintings that transform and shift perspectives, exploring environmental themes. Her films often imagine how non-human beings might view humanity’s impact. She is Associate Professor at Towson University and lives outside Baltimore, Maryland. Her animated films have screened at museums including National Gallery, MoMA, and the Pompidou Center, and at international animation festivals including Annecy, Ottawa, Hiroshima, and Tricky Women. She has a long history with the Thomas Edison (Black Maria) Film Festival; her first clay on glass animation,  I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died , was a festival selection in 1989, and The Same Moon  received a Director’s Citation in 1996. You can find her recent award-winning work including The Ballad of Holland Island House (2015 Jury’s Citation) and The Elephant’s Song (2019 Global Insights Stellar Award Winner) on her website, lynntomlinson.com/, and on Vimeo. Her latest film, Ten Degrees of Strange (2022 Jury Choice Award), created in the spring of 2021 to accompany a song by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, received Best Commissioned Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, a Vimeo Staff Pick, and a Juror’s Citation at the 2021 Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival.