Martina Scarpelli is an Italian animation director, creative director, artist and producer based in Viborg, Denmark. In this conversation, she looks back on a path into animation that was never planned. Her early interests were fine art, drawing, printmaking and frescoes, but encounters with William Kentridge's animated drawings and Joseph Pierce's A Family Portrait revealed how her visual work could move and become cinematic storytelling.

After studying at the Brera Academy in Milan and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Turin, Scarpelli joined the European programme Animation Sans Frontières. A workshop and residency brought her to Viborg, where she developed her first professional film and became part of the city's animation community.

Scarpelli speaks about working across formats rather than repeating a single kind of production. Her projects include animation within feature documentaries such as Trine on Fire, creative direction for the audiovisual experiences at Museum Wibergis, and experiments with digital theatre, concerts and VR.

She also offers a detailed account of developing Egg, a personal film shaped by her experience with an eating disorder, and discusses the long-term creation of Psychomachia, an animated opera. Throughout, she reflects on curiosity, vulnerability, artistic language and finding a sustainable life in animation.