Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Wasan Hayajneh. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Wasan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

When I was in college, I worried a lot about whether my work was good enough- in areas of composition, draftsmanship, gestural study. Even though, by a lot of standards it could be considered quite good, my concern was that people, especially my instructors, were being nice to me out of pity. Insecurity in ones craft is inevitable when you’re starting out, especially halfway through, but a secret that many people don’t tell you is that there will always be times when your taste outpaces your skill- and it doesn’t mean that you aren’t good enough, it just means that you’ve become aware of where your destination is.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Wasan Hayajneh and I am an animation director and storyteller. My graduate film ELECTRA WASP is about Amelia Earhart dreaming about her past on a desert island. In a lot of ways it is about loving what you do deeply and rapturously. I specialize in story development, animation and compositing.

I have a taste for more experimental ideas and approaches, and enjoy layering themes in my work. I enjoy the storyboarding phase the most. Outside of animation I have dabbled in comics and game development in the past.

I worked on ELECTRA WASP throughout my three years of graduate studies at SCAD. My professors were brilliant people who let me chew on my ideas during class and outside of it. The result was a collage of decaying memory, bittersweet documentarian truncation and a ghostly reverie. As of this interview, ELECTRA WASP has been accepted at 6 film festivals and is a finalist at 2 of them!

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

It’s so important to understand that creating isn’t easy. You don’t press a button and magically have results. You spend years honing your craft. You create your own theories and creative ethic. Creativity is timely, and thoughtful, and so deeply entrenched in the human element. This misconception comes up everywhere from questioning prices to the idea that AI can be a reasonable substitute for the human thought process that governs creativity. Human ingenuity and imagination can never be faked or substituted, and should be respected for what it is.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

A personal mission of mine is to make it easier for the marginalized voices who come after me to tell their own stories, and that hopefully the groundbreaking and controversial stories of today will someday become passe enough that the next generation doesn’t struggle to find their words tomorrow.

Being a woman of middle eastern descent, I’ve struggled with the social pressure to make myself smaller and quieter. Many of us react to this by getting louder, which is how we beat the system! My directorial debut, ELECTRA WASP, is about a woman in history who struggled with others expectations of who she had to be, then chose to live her life on her own terms. I think we should all pursue living on our own terms, and no one else’s.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wasanhayajneh.com/portfolio

Image Credits
ELECTRA WASP (2023), Dir. Wasan Hayajneh