Em Cooper is a British artist and film director working in oil-paint animation and film.

She is interested in subjectivity. Her oil-painted film practice has developed in answer to a desire to express the sensation of lived-experience. Her interest is in approaching what it feels like to be alive in the world, making representation into expression, or part of a passing moment of sensation.

She is the 2024 winner of the Grammy for Best Music Video, for her oil-painted video for The Beatles, I’m Only Sleeping, commissioned in 2022 for their re-release of Revolver.

In 2018 she was nominated for an Emmy for her collaboration with poet and activist DJ Savarese, in the film Deej. Her installation work includes Emergence, an immersive artwork and collaboration with composer Jim Perkins for the Turner Contemporary Margate. In 2024 she was commissioned to create two sequences for the movie Paddington in Peru.

Her distinctive style of continuous motion in oil-paint combines psychological insight with an intuitive method of working the paint: each frame is painted by hand, and composed instinctively into sequences in a process she calls choreographing.

Em is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Sheffield Hallam University (Fine Art).

Enquiries: contact@emcooper.com
Instagram: @emcooperanimation