Cathy Joritz Obituary

Cathy (Catherine Ann) Joritz, 63, was an award winning filmmaker and teacher. She was born May 7, 1959 in Kankakee, Illinois, and attended the Chicago Institute of Art, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1983. She moved to Germany and earned an additional two degrees in Art; from the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig and a Master of Fine Arts from the Bauhaus University in Weimer. During this time she made several award winning films. The most well-known of these was Negative Man (1985), an exemplary structural film that captured the zeitgeist of the European Feminist movement of the 1980s, and for which she won an award at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. Another, Give Aids the Freeze (1988) won the Grand Prix at the Holland Animation Film Festival. (Both available on YouTube.) Cathy taught throughout Germany and in Switzerland until 2010 when she returned to the United States to be closer to her aging parents. She taught in the Department of Digital Arts in the School of Art at Bowling Green University in Ohio and in the Department of Art at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. From 2013 to 2017 she taught Film Animation at the University of Kansas in the Department of Film and Media Studies. She was beloved by her students and tirelessly promoted them and their work, finding screening opportunities for them around campus, helping them enter film festivals and find jobs. Cathy continued teaching after leaving the University offering classes in Animation at the Lawrence Art Center. She passed comfortably at her home in Perry, KS on November 30. Cathy is survived by brother, Mark Joritz (Sue) and sister, Jane Joritz. She was preceded in death by brother Paul and her parents, Fred and Virginia Joritz. You can see her work at cjanimation.wordpress.com