Skip to main content

California Institute of the Arts

Ben Reicher

Pronouns: Department of Creative Computing

Faculty, Creative Computing

photo of Ben Reicher
Email address: breicher@calarts.edu
Office address:
California Institute of the Arts
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, California 91355
Degrees:

Ben Reicher is an animation director and CG lead with 18 years of experience across film, television, and games. He has served as Head of CG, Technical Director at Halon Entertainment, CG Supervisor at Encyclopedia Pictura, and Lead Unreal Artist at PIXOMONDO on The Mandalorian and Star Trek: Picard. Since 2018 he has run Valor Cat Studios, an independent animated series that he now renders with his own Wave Optics Light Simulator.

Along the way he made shots for Venom, Detective Pikachu, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Fortnite cinematics, and Hogwarts Legacy.

He started young: in high school he was lighting and modeling for research at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and Disney Research, with work shown at SIGGRAPH 2011. He earned his BFA in Animation at CalArts in 2016. He teaches because he wants students to have the tools he had to find on his own.