A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen (Écran d'épingles), a vertically-mounted grid of between 240,000 and 1 million sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame.

[1] While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early optical toys like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels.

A model with sufficient pin "resolution" can be used to create a Pinscreen animation of photorealistic images, a painstaking process analogous to modern pixel art.

Parker shared directing credits for her films with her husband and collaborator, Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff; however, the 1935 French and 1937 U.S. patents on the Pinscreen were made in her name alone.

As of 2012[update], the last known original Pinscreen still being used in animation production is maintained at the National Film Board of Canada's main campus in Montreal.