Joe is a multidisciplinary artist working across multiple mediums: painter, theatre director and animator.

“Painting. Theatre. Animation. They’re all expressions of the same thing.”

Joe Lichtenstein moves between worlds—painting, theatre direction, animation—each a different doorway leading to the same strange place. His work lives in the space between opposites: grief and joy, solitude and connection, stillness and motion. Things flicker. Things breathe. A moment is frozen, then it shifts. A figure lingers in the frame, waiting.

In his stop-motion work, the inanimate stirs, as if waking from a long sleep. “It’s a kind of theatre,” he says. A quiet alchemy. This fascination with movement—where it begins, where it stops—runs through everything he makes. In Fiesta, he closed the fire curtain and placed the audience directly on stage. No longer just watching. Feeling. Inside the thing itself.

Displacement, longing, transformation—these themes echo through his work like a recurring dream. A family history shaped by upheaval. Shops smashed during Kristallnacht. These shadows move beneath his paintings, flickering through his characters, through the spaces they inhabit. Hunger. Cold. The heat of dreams.

And yet—joy. The joy of color, of movement, of something breaking through. In If Only We Could Talk, audiences weren’t just looking at paintings; they were inside them, mirrored back. His work doesn’t just sit still—it breathes, invites, transforms. Like a dream half-remembered, just on the edge of waking.

Out in his Essex countryside studio, solitude hums in the air. The need to push further, to chase something just out of reach. And then—the moment. When the work reaches out. When stillness turns into motion. When displacement feels, for just an instant, like home.

“Where does movement end and stillness begin? I want to find it.”