Celia Pleete is the pseudonym for Alice Teeple.

Biography

Alice Catherine Teeple, born 5 January 1979, is an American filmmaker and satirist known for her animated shorts and now-defunct e-zine Exquisite Dead Guy. Teeple has yet to be named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people.

Personal Life

Teeple was born in Woodward, PA, the eldest of two girls. A lack of television reception and human contact left Teeple at the whim of her overactive imagination. With the encouragement of her parents, Bruce and Michelle, she learned how to read at the age of two. When her younger sister Jane was still a baby, the Teeple family eventually relocated seven miles away to Aaronsburg. By her own account, Teeple found the transition difficult, and, being used to playing alone, did not make new friends very easily. Instead, she continued her love for art and voracious reading, and assisted her father, the curator of the local historical museum. Teeple credits the latter experience as the source of her obsession with all things anachronistic. Spending hours in this museum, interacting with antiques on a level few experience, fired her imagination.

Teeple attended the lackluster Penns Valley Elementary school. She attended the even more lackluster Penns Valley Area High School across the street. While there, she got into the drama program and discovered her love for comedy. She starred as a random hillbilly in 1994's production of Li'l Abner, Mrs Bedwin in the 1995 production of Oliver! and as Evangeline the Voodoo Priestess in the 1997 production of Meet The Creeps. She also spent time with friends making twisted movies about suicidal Barbie dolls and taping dead bugs to envelopes when she sent letters to friends.

In 1996, Teeple travelled to Spain with her Spanish class, which spawned further interest in different cultures and a disdain for Gen-X Americans abroad. She swore after this that she'd welcome all cultural differences with open arms, and damn the morons in her own country who won't enjoy foreign experiences.

After high school, she spent 8 years earning her B.A. in Integrative Arts at Penn State University. Intially, she was classically trained in illustration and painting, until her beginning German teacher encouraged her to make movies in lieu of oral exams. After that, Teeple was hooked. While at Penn State, she served as the president of the Penn State Juggling Club between 2001-2002, wrote Hall of Heads for The Daily Collegian, helped to revive the long-defunct Penn State Froth magazine, contributed various essays and drawings to friends' e-zines, and co-created Exquisite Dead Guy with comic artist Stephanie Pulford.

In 2002 Teeple received an award for Excellence In Animation at the Penn State Film Festival for three music videos. Her collaborative efforts with a closeknit core of friends resulted in a TV show for PSN-TV called The Sanity Clause. Teeple wrote, directed, edited, composed music for, acted in, animated, and produced an entire season of this show...singlehandedly. She still, to this day, has no idea how she did it.

Currently Teeple writes for The Mad Vortex[2001], yet another collaborative effort.

Trivia

Teeple can ride a unicycle and juggle knives and fire - but not all at once. She occasionally has bouts of insomnia, which usually result in her artwork. Some of her most acclaimed films were created at 3 AM, fueled by an addiction to Mountain Dew and pretzels. Teeple despises olives and anything containing sucralose. Teeple thinks having a Wikipedia entry about herself is pretty cool and is writing this as if she actually has accomplished something brilliant, when in fact she's a total goofball and spends most of her time scanning pictures of demented people in bad sweaters.