Notable almuni

Henry Anderson (BFA 88, Character Animation) received an Academy Award nomination in 2000 for supervising animation on the film Stuart Little. Earlier, in 1992, he had won an Emmy for helping to create special visual effects on the TV movie The Last Halloween.

Robin Anderson (BFA 95, Character Animation) is the character art director at the gaming division of Saban Entertainment. Previously, she was an animator at Disney.

Lorette Bayle's (MFA 99, Film Directing) most recent work, the documentary Conversations With Nickle, follows an eight-year struggle against the Lou Gehrig's disease by her close friend, artist and set designer Gay Nickle Lauritzen. The 35mm doc won several awards and was licensed by HBO. Bayle currently works as an executive at the Eastman Kodak Company's Feature Segment and continues to make films as an independent producer-director.

Brad Bird (76, Character Animation) wrote the screen story and directed The Iron Giant, among the best reviewed animated features of 1999. It won the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement and was named best animated film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. After joining Pixar Animation Studios, Bird wrote and directed the feature The Incredibles.

Dave Bossert (BFA 83, Character Animation) is Creative Director, Walt Disney Animation Studios. Previously, he was the artistic coordinator and visual effects supervisor on Fantasia 2000 and, more recently, the associate producer of the short Destino, a work begun by Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí more than 50 years ago and completed only in 2003 by Dominique Monfery. Destino received an Academy Award nomination for best animated short in 2004.

Bill Brown (MFA 97, Film & Video) received a Fulbright Fellowship to investigate issues of nationality and national identity while traveling along the Trans-Canadian Highway. The result was a documentary film called Confederation Park, which won two awards at the 2000 Ann Arbor Film Festival. His next film, Buffalo Common, a work about nuclear weapon depots throughout the farmlands of North Dakota, screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003 after being named best documentary short at the 2002 New York Underground Film Festival.

Brendan Burch (BFA 00, Character Animation) in 2003, co-founded, and serves as CEO of an independent animation studio in Los Angeles called Six Point Harness.  Six Point produced TV's Where My Dogs At,  Wow Wow Wubbsy!, and episodes of El Tigre.  To date, Six Point's biggest hit was BET's Read a Book, now seen by over 20 million people online.  Brendan continues to work with animation schools around the world promoting and teaching digital, 2D animation production.

Tim Burton (79, Character Animation) has directed the movies Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Ed Wood, among others. He is currently working on a new version of the classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, slated to be released in 2005.

Brenda Chapman (BFA 87, Character Animation) directed The Prince of Egypt for DreamWorks Pictures. Earlier, she had received an Annie Award for her work as story supervisor on the 1994 hit The Lion King.

Peter Chung (81, Experimental Animation) is the creator of Aeon Flux, the cult animated series that ran on MTV. More recently, he was one of the seven leading directors--alongside the likes of Mahiro Maeda and Shinichiro Watanabe--on the animated-shorts anthology The Animatrix. Chung's segment, Matriculated, was one of the anthology's most daring. Chung has since directed the animated short The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, released on DVD in the summer of 2004.

Sean Daniel (BFA 73, Film & Video) was president of production for Universal Pictures from 1984 to 1988 and supervised the films National Lampoon's Animal House, Coal Miner's Daughter, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, Brazil, Field of Dreams and Do the Right Thing. In 1992, Daniel formed Alphaville Films, an independent media company headquartered at Paramount Studios, and went on to produce films such as Dazed and Confused, American Me, The Mummy, The Scorpion King, Pootie Tang and Intolerable Cruelties.

Eric Darnell (MFA 90, Experimental Animation) co-directed Antz, the first computer-animated feature produced by DreamWorks Pictures. Darnell is currently directing DreamWorks' Madagascar, an animated feature scheduled to be released in 2005.

Dane Davis (BFA 81, Film & Video) is founder and president of Dane Tracks, a sound design and editing studio. In 2000, he won an Academy Award for his sound effects editing on The Matrix. Davis has since served as sound designer and supervising sound editor on the last two installments of the Matrix franchise. He has worked on numerous other movies, including 8 Mile and Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Paul Demeyer (MFA 77, Experimental Animation) directed Rugrats in Paris: The Movie. Earlier, while at the animation studio Klasky Csupo, he directed spots for the likes of MCI and Taco Bell. Demeyer teaches at CalArts.

Pete Docter (BFA 90, Character Animation) is one of the key figures at Pixar Animation Studios. Most recently, he co-directed the Disney/Pixar hit Monsters, Inc., nominated for the best animated feature award at the 2002 Oscars. Docter also worked on the original story and provided additional voices for the film. Previously, he had won an Annie Award for co-writing Toy Story 2 and received an Oscar nomination for co-writing Toy Story.

Ralph Eggleston (86, Character Animation) has worked at Pixar Animation Studios since 1992. His film For the Birds won the Academy Award for best animated short at the 2002 Oscars. He also holds an Annie Award for his production design work on Toy Story. Eggleston has been named by Animation Magazine as one of the most creative people in animation.

Robert Fenz (MFA 02, Film & Video) has received widespread acclaim for his film cycle Meditations on Revolution, an eclectic set of five 16mm black-and-white experimental shorts. His work has been shown at the New York, London, Rotterdam and Vienna film festivals, the Pacific Film Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Biennial, among other venues. In 2004, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Steve Hillenburg (MFA 92, Experimental Animation) is the creator of the hit animated series SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon. In 2002, the show became the highest-rated kids' show on cable television. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie was released in the fall of 2004.

William E. Jones (MFA 90, Film & Video) has directed two feature films and three short videos. His film Finished was voted best independent/experimental film of 1997 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999.

Glen Keane (74, Experimental Animation) has been the supervising animator for memorable characters such as Tarzan, Pocahontas, Aladdin, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Ariel in The Little Mermaid, and Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under. He won an Annie Award for his character animation work on Beauty and the Beast and received an Annie nomination for Tarzan. In 2004, he received the Friz Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Carole Kim (MFA 01, Film & Video-Integrated Media) creates unique performance-based multimedia installations, where the stream of projected images becomes a medium for improvisation. Kim has presented her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Knitting Factory in Hollywood, Highways in Santa Monica, and the Stanford Jazz Festival.

Gina Kim's (MFA 99, Film & Video) feature-length film Invisible Light, an exploration of a woman's struggle to free herself from obsessive behavior, has screened at the Vancouver, Rotterdam, Locarno and Buenos Aires festivals throughout 2003 and 2004.

Mark Kirkland (BFA 78, Experimental Animation) has directed more than 30 episodes of The Simpsons.

Animated films by Amy Kravitz (MFA 86, Experimental Animation) include Trap and Roost. She is a professor of animation at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Joel Lam's (MFA 01, Film & Video) thesis film, the documentary The Circle's Corner, gives a poetic representation of Hong Kong as experienced by three residents--one blind, one deaf and one mute. It won the award for best short at the Hong Kong Film Festival and was also shown at the Yagamata International Documentary Festival, the Viennale and Rotterdam's Shadow Festival.

John Lasseter (BFA 79, Character Animation) is executive vice president of creative development at Pixar Animation Studios--described by the Los Angeles Times as "the most reliable creative force in Hollywood." Lasseter has directed Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2 and executive-produced Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. He has won Academy Awards for Toy Story (special achievement) and The Tin Soldier (best animated short film). His original screenplay for Toy Story was also nominated for an Oscar.

Lin Li's (MFA 01, Film & Video) thesis documentary, Three-Five People, is a harrowing account of heroin-addicted, HIV-positive homeless youth in the Szechwan city of Chengdu. It has been shown at the Yagamata International Documentary Festival, the Viennale, the Rotterdam Shadow Festival and fests in Bologna and Pusan, among other venues.

James Mangold (BFA 85, Film & Video) directed the acclaimed Girl, Interrupted. His other movies include Identity, Kate and Leopold, Copland and Heavy, for which he was named best director at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. He is currently working on the feature Walk the Line, a biopic about Johnny Cash.

Craig McCracken (92, Character Animation) is the creator of The Powerpuff Girls, an Emmy-nominated series on the Cartoon Network. The show originated as The Whoopass Girls--a work McCracken made at CalArts.

Jennifer Medlin's (BFA 01, Film & Video) documentary Kitties, an exploration of suburban angst, has been shown at Cinema Texas, the Rotterdam Shadow Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the PEK Festival in The Hague.

Waleed Moursi (MFA 03, Film Directing) collected the Gold Medal in the alternative category at the 30th Student Academy Awards with the film The Projects Lumiere.

M. David Mullen (MFA 91, Film & Video) has been the director of photography on numerous independent features, including Twin Falls Idaho and the sumptuous Northfork, a surreal 1950s drama in which the residents of a fictional Montana town hold out against government-enforced relocation. Mullen's work on these films--both directed by CalArts alum Michael Polish (Art BFA 92)--earned nominations for Independent Spirit Awards in 2000 and 2004.

Michael Nguyen (88, Character Animation) was a supervising animator on the Warner Bros. animated feature The Iron Giant and handled character animation and storyboarding on 20th Century Fox's The Pagemaster. Nguyen owns and runs the July Films Animation Studio.

Mark Osborne (BFA 92, Experimental Animation) directed the stop-motion short More, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1999. The work also won special jury prizes at the Sundance Film Festival, the Aspen Shorts Fest and the USA Film Festival in Dallas. His first feature film, Dropping Out, premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Osborne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.

Christine Panushka (MFA 83, Experimental Animation) teaches animation at the USC School of Cinema-Television. Her work includes the films Nighttime Fears and Fantasies: A Bedtime Tale for a Young Girl and The Sum of Things. She is the creator of the award-winning Web site Absolut Panushka.

Joanna Priestley (MFA 85, Experimental Animation) has directed and produced 16 films. She has received numerous accolades at film festivals throughout the world and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute and Creative Capital. Her films have been shown on PBS and the BBC and as part of retrospectives at MoMA in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Stuttgart International Animation Festival in Germany. Her most recent work is the animated short Andaluz.

Christiane Robbins (MFA 88, Film & Video) is director of the Matrix Program for Digital Media and the Visual Arts at USC. She is also a principal of Jetztzeit, a studio researching issues critical to the intersection and negotiation of visual culture, digital media and video practice. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum and MoMA in New York and the Rotterdam and Berlin film festivals, among other venues.

Kathy Rose (MFA 74, Experimental Animation) has created a unique form of theater that combines filmed animation and performance art. She has presented this work at venues around the globe. Rose's films include The Mysterians, The Mirror People, The Dooodlers and Pencil Booklings. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003.

In 2003, Jen Sachs (MFA 01, Experimental Animation) was named as one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" by the magazine Filmmaker. She has made waves on the festival circuit with the award-winning Velvet Tigress, an animated documentary about the infamous 1931 trial of "Trunk Murderess" Winnie Ruth Judd.

April Scott-Goss (MFA 99, Film Directing) directed Deep in My Heart, a film chronicling the impact of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on her own family. The work was shown at the Cannes Film Festival twice, in 2000 and 2001. She also directed As Beauty Does, a film version of one-person stage show by writer-performer Stephanie Berlanga that deals with socially imposed norms of feminine beauty. The film was screened as part of EdgeFest 2003.

Henry Selick (MFA 77, Experimental Animation) has directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone. He is currently working on a film version of Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman's children's novel.

Simeon Soffer's (CRT 83, Experimental Animation) documentary short, The Wildest Show in the South: The Angola Prison Rodeo, was nominated for an Academy Award and won the International Documentary Association Award in 2000. Soffer has also directed music videos for artists such as Bad Religion and Bobby Brown.

Deborah Stratman (MFA 95, Film & Video) presented the film In Order Not to Be Here in a solo show at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood. The work, a meditation on the uncanny powers of surveillance devices in the suburban night, had earlier screened at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Stratman, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a featured artist in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, is working on a film called Meet Adiljan, set in the expanses of the Taklamakan Desert in China's Xinjiang autonomous province. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Films by Steven Subotnick (BFA 84, MFA 86, Experimental Animation) include Glass Crow, a poetic meditation on the Thirty Years War; Devil's Book, a collaged and calligraphic abstraction inspired by a story by Isaac Perez; and Hairyman, an associative fable based on American folktales. He teaches animation at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The most recent work by Tamara Tracz (BFA 02, Film & Video), the short Bitter, combines live action and animated text. It has been screened around the world in 2003 and 2004, including the festivals in Montreal, Vienna, Rotterdam and São Paulo. Bitter received top prizes at the NextFrame Touring Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She has also written for the journal Senses of Cinema.

Gary Trousdale (82, Character Animation) and Kirk Wise (CRT 85, Character Animation) have co-directed Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Their Beauty and the Beast was the first animated feature to earn an Oscar nomination for best picture.

Andrew Tsao (MFA 90, Film Directing) is a veteran director of situation comedies. His credits include Home Improvement, Friends, Suddenly Susan and, most recently, The Tracy Morgan Show.

Naomi Uman (MFA 98, Film & Video) premiered her film Removed at the 1999 New York Film Festival. Her thesis film, Leche, won the Golden Spire Award for New Visions at the 1999 San Francisco Film Festival and has screened at festivals throughout the world. Uman received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Christopher Wilcha (MFA 98, Film & Video) made The Target Shoots First, a documentary about the mail order CD and tape club Columbia House, as his thesis project. The film received several awards at the South by Southwest, Slamdance and New York Underground film festivals in 2000 and was shown on Cinemax in 2001. Wilcha's documentary The Social History of the Mosh Pit premiered on MTV in 2002 while the pilot episode of Second Hand Stories was shown on PBS in 2003.

Travis Wilkerson (MFA 01, Film & Video) directed the experimental documentary An Injury to One, a work that takes up the 1917 lynching of union organizer Frank Little in the copper mining town of Butte, MT, as a pivotal event in that area's history. The doc was shown at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2003 Sundance Festival.

David Wilson (MFA 76, Experimental Animation) is founder, director and curator of the one-of-a-kind Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA. Wilson, who was the subject of Lawrence Wechsler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001.

Milla Zeltzer (BFA 03, Character Animation) is cofounder, along with Christina Angelina, of the gallery Milla Angelina in Hollywood. Most recently, the pair curated The L.A. Show. Zeltzer's animated films have been featured at the 2004 AniFest in Trebon in the Czech Republic while her paintings have been shown as part of the exhibition Art and Democracy III.

Please Note: The Program in Film & Video was formerly known as the Live-Action Program. The Program in Experimental Animation now incorporates the former Film Graphics Program. The Film Directing Program was formerly named the Directing for Theater, Video and Cinema Program.