In this episode, Juliana talks with Malado Francine, a Los Angeles-based American multi-media artist, about her new series, My Monsters, and her relationship with the creatures in her life. They discuss AI, aliens, future selves, empathy, monsters, and the interspecies connectivity of the eye.

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Conversations with Animals is a monthly podcast hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with nonhuman animal lives. Expect interviews with ecological writers, filmmakers, vegan chefs, animal-related spaces, artists, and more! Each month, a fresh companion newsletter is published. Subscribe: www.julianaroth.com/drawinganimals

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Malado Francine (b. Malado Francine Baldwin-Tejeda) is an American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.  Her work in multiple media examines the intersection of culture and identity through the re-telling of personal narratives. Outstanding influences in her work include a childhood spent in Dakar, Senegal and Bamako, Mali as the daughter of former Peace Corps volunteers in a mixed-race family of Hispanic descent.  She holds a BA in comparative literature from Swarthmore College, and an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School. She spent more than 15 years living and making art in New York City before moving to Los Angeles in 2013.

Her work is in public and private collections worldwide, including her early film work as a part of Miranda July’s Joanie4Jackie film archive at Bard College and the Getty Research Institute, the William Louis-Dreyfus collection, Kean University, Michael Levine Foundation, The Philosophical Research Society, and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg collection.

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Juliana is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. She teaches writing at NYU.