USC Division of Animation & Digital Arts - Faculty Gallery

Fulltime Faculty
	Christine Panushka History of Animation, Master's Thesis I and II, Professor panushka@usc.edu Home Page Christine's Gallery Christine Panushka is an internationally known award wining artist, filmmaker/animator and educator. Her films have been screened in Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Holland, England, Poland, Canada and the United States. They have won numerous awards including the Grand Prize at the Aspen Filmfest and a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her work explores the female psyche and uses stillness and small gestures to describe internal emotional and spiritual states. Critics have described her work as "completely original and capable of affecting both cerebral and sensual complexities." Named an Absolut Visionary in 1996, she conceptualized, directed and curated "Absolut Panushka," the second issue in a series of content based web sites sponsored by Absolut Vodka. "Absolut Panushka" is a ground breaking web site which supports and promotes experimental animation. It features a festival section, highlighting the work of 32 world class animators, including Panushka. Also included are a history section written by Dr. William Moritz and an animation tool, where anyone in the world can produce a piece of animation and have it posted on the site. "Absolut Panushka" has been honored with an "Award of Excellence" from Communication Arts Magazine, 1st prize for Animation on the Internet by both the World Animation Celebration in Los Angeles and the Holland International Animation Film Festival in Utrecht. She received her MFA in 1982 from the California Institute of the Arts.
	Kathy Smith Chair and Associate Professor, Contemporary Topics in Animation, Expanded Animation kates@usc.edu http://www.kathymoods.org Kathy Smith was educated at Sydney College of the Arts in Visual Communication Design 1982-1985, Sydney Australia. In 1987 -1988, she was awarded a travelling arts scholarship for painting and animation from Sydney Morning Herald, the Australia Council for the Arts, and a post baccalaureate study grant and studio residency from the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris, France and SACI Florence, Italy. She has independently produced animation since 1982 and exhibited internationally with various festivals, solo and group exhibitions since 1986. She has been consistently supported by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and most recently the Australian Film Commission for her production "Indefinable Moods", a 2D/3D oil painted animation.
Research Professor
	Richard Weinberg Animation Department Seminar, Research Associate Professor weinberg@pollux.usc.edu Richard Weinberg, Ph.D., is the Director and Founder of the USC Computer Animation Laboratory, which he established in 1985. He also serves as the Chief Technology Officer of USC's Annenberg Center for Communications. He co-designed the original curriculum for USC's MFA in Film, Video and Computer Animation program, and established the CG Hatchery at USC's Annenberg Center Multimedia Incubator. His research has included work in the areas of computer animation, neurosurgery visualization, graphics system design, multimedia, scientific visualization and entertainment technology. He obtained a Ph.D. and M.S. degree from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. degree from Cornell University, in the field of computer science / computer graphics. He established the Computer Graphics Group at Cray Research, and has developed computer graphics software and systems for NASA, Lockheed, Digital Productions, Ardent Computer and the USC University Hospital. In 1984, he co-chaired the SIGGRAPH '84 conference in Minneapolis, and has received the Golden Eagle Award.
Adjunct Faculty
	Mar Elepano Production Supervisor, Basic Motion Picture Techniques for Animators, Animation Department Seminar, Directed Studies elepano@usc.edu Mar's gallery Mar Elepano has been teaching at the MFA Animation program of the Division of Animation & Digital Arts of the School of Cinema-Television of USC since 1993. He also serves as the Production Supervisor of the division. He has been involved with Visual Communications Inc., a Los Angeles based Asian American community media arts group, since 1986 doing media workshops. From 1988-94 he was artist-in-residence at different Los Angeles high schools creating media pieces with young people. He did similar workshops at the California Institution for Men in Chino from 1992 to 1994. He is currently involved with the Magnolia elementary school conducting an animation workshop for 2-5 grade students and has been every year since 1996. Mar Elepano was awarded the Tatsukawa Memorial Fund Award in 2003 for his commitment to community service and the advancement of the Asian Pacific American Media Arts.
	Everett Lewis Animation Theory and Techniques, Senior Lecturer Everett Lewis is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose graphic, experimental, and narrative films have been screened nationally and internationally at Sundance, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, London, Edinburgh, Chicago, Milan, Stockholm, (et al) Film Festivals. His films are in distribution in the US, UK, Germany, Taiwan, and Italy. One of his films is in rotation on the Sundance Channel. His most recent film is "Eye of My Heart", a kinestatic graphic documentary for Fox/The City of LA. The film uses still photographs from 180 ten to twelve year olds to self-document their inner and outer lives. His experimental film, "Skin & Bone" is currently in distribution in the US, and he is currently exploring the adaptation of a comic book into a narrative feature.
	Cornelius Cole Life Drawing Workshop bazu2@earthlink.net Cornelius Cole is an animation filmmaker, graphic artist, painter, sculptor, and designer who has worked in the animation industry for the past forty years. He received his education at Chouinard Art Institute.
	Joe Janeti Writing for Animation, Adjunct Professor in USC Cinema-Television's Writing Division He discovered Cirque du Soleil and executive produced their first tour ever out of Canada; he has written and produced specials for PBS, medical documentaries and music events. He has written and sold screenplays, published book chapters and journal articles on medicine, folk music, American studies, sculpture, psychology and energy. He was Executive Vice-President of Monarch Pictures. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies and a second Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.
	Eric Hanson Visual Effects ehanson001@comcast.net http://www.visuraimaging.com ERIC HANSON is a visual effects designer specializing in the creation of digital environments and effects for feature films. Having worked with leading visual effects houses such as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images, and Walt Disney Feature Animation, his work can be seen in the "The Day After Tomorrow", "Cast Away", "Hollow Man", "Mission to Mars", "Bicentennial Man", "Fantasia 2000", "Atlantis", and "Fifth Element". Eric is a member of the Visual Effects Society and attended the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently on staff at Digital Domain as a team lead on an upcoming blockbuster in addition to having recently published his first book, Maya 5 Killer Tips. He wishes he could sleep more.
	Lisa Mann Introduction to Film, Video and Computer Animation, Animation Production I roadkill@earthlink.net Lisa Mann is an independent filmmaker and visual artist. Since the early '80s, she has created and exhibited installations, performance artworks, photo-based sculptures, and films and videos meshing live-action and experimental animation. Her film, Seven Lucky Charms, received a 1992 Student Academy Award and was awarded Best Experimental Film in the '93 Atlanta Film and Video Festival. It has been screened at numerous domestic and international film festivals, including Ann Arbor, Films de Femmes International of Creteil, France, and Edinburgh International. In 1995, she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, an Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Grant, and a Brody Media Fellowship Grant for Cat Calls, a film which is currently in progress. Lisa is a founding member of M.A.M.A. (Mother Artists Making Art), a collaborative group of women artists who have recently become mothers.Their interdisciplinary art projects deconstruct motherhood and have been installed, performed or webcast as part of the Arroyo Art Collective's Without Alarm II group show, NewTown Foundation's New Windows @ One Colorado, and the 1998 L.A. Freewaves Festival. In 1992, Lisa received her MFA in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts, and in 1982 she received her BFA in Art from Brown University. Prior to teaching animation at USC, she taught experimental animation and art at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and worked in the film industry as an optical printer operator. She served as projectionist and sometime curator of Los Angeles Filmforum from 1991-1994. She is currently on the Board of Directors of NewTown Foundation, an artist-run, non-profit organization dedicated to presenting multidisciplinary art in unconventional formats in Southern California. She is the creator of NewTown's Reels On Wheels, a mobile film series.
	Michael Scroggins Introduction to Computer Animation, Fundamentals of Computer Animation aka@emsh.calarts.edu http://emsh.calarts.edu/~aka Michael Scroggins received his MFA from CalArts and has been a member of the faculty there since 1978. He studied video under Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe with whom he worked on the construction of the historic Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. He has been working in realtime videographic animation since 1970, non-realtime 3D computer animation since 1983, and realtime 3D computer animation since 1992. His "absolute" animation works have been widely screened internationally, including exhibitions at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, Union of Filmmakers in Moscow, Seibu Ginza in Tokyo, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. His work has also been honored at numerous festivals; among them, the Sony-AFI National Video Festival in Washington DC, ARS OE83 in Helsinki, Annecy OE85 International Animation Festival in France, Hiroshima OE87 International Animation Festival in Japan. His video compositions, "Power Spot", and "Solaire", commissioned by composer Jon Hassell, share the distinction of being the first music videos acquired by ECM Records. In addition to his recorded work, he has created live interactive video performances at multimedia events such as "Telos et Koine" at the Manca Festival in Nice and "Mata-Pau" at the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle OE92 in Metz. He has been active in the field of immersive Virtual Reality, and in 1992 received a grant from the Banff Centre for the Arts to produce a VR work, A Topological Slide, which premiered in 1994 at The Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace. His most recent work investigates the potential of gesture capture in creating realtime absolute animation in immersive VR.
	Tom Sito Character Animation Tom Sito was born in New York City in 1956 and received his BFA at the School of Visual Arts with additional training at the Arts Student's League. Since 1975, he has worked in New York, London, Toronto, and Hollywood in all facets of animation production for clients ranging from Playboy to NATO. His television work includes directing on the series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Fat Albert, and the 1982 Emmy Award winner Ziggy's Gift. At Walt Disney Studios, Tom's talent contributed to the classic hits, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas. He was instrumental in setting up the feature animation division of Dreamworks SKG, and he contributed to Antz, Prince of Egypt, Paulie: A Parrot's Tale, Shrek, and Spirit. Tom has written articles on animation for leading trade publications, he teaches animation at USC, Cal Arts, and AFI, and since 1993, he has been President of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists' Union, Local# 839, where he is an outspoken champion of the rights of artists. In 1996, Animation Magazine named Tom Sito "one of the 100 Most Influential People in Animation today". He is currently at Warner Bros.
	Trixy Sweetvittles Introduction to Film Graphics & Animation Trixy Sweetvittles is an independent animator, filmmaker, visual and performing artist. Her films �La Mujer Lagartija� and �Mermaids and Pickles� have screened at numerous venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Holland Animation Festival and San Francisco Cinematheque. In 1998, her puppet show �Pudinella Parsnip� was showcased in the Jim Henson International Puppetry Festival. In 2001, she curated The Sweetvittles Wild and Wooley Animation Festival, a showcase of current independent animated films. The festival toured ten cities in the US and Canada. Trixy received an MFA in experimental animation from California Institute of the Arts in 1996. Her industry experience includes serving as animation director for the Nickelodeon television series Blue�s Clues. She has taught animation, film and digital video classes and workshops at Parsons School of Design, Cal State Northridge and Austin Cinemaker Coop. For the past two years, she has chaired the Animation Department at the California State Summer School for the Arts.
	`Janusz Sikora Intermediate Cinematography` `http://www.lightextreme.com/` Award-winning cinematographer has been intermittently teaching cinematography at USC, UCLA, Rockport-Maine, NYFA, Columbia College. He travels the country and abroad with Workshops and Seminars for professionals in Film and Television industry. He has been Exposure and Light consultant for Spectra Cine -the legendary motion picture light meter - Spectra. Light has been his preocupation for over twenty years. Janusz cultivates classic approach to light as exercised by Masters of painting and photography (Classic Portrait). He has shot numerous films and received Gold Plaque Award for Cinematography at the Chicago International Film Festival. He is experienced "extreme cinematographer" having shot film at the North Pole, Arabian Desert and Indian Ocean. His large format Illustrations have been published by national magazines. His favored aspect of cinematography is expressing mood and emotion with Light, where he draws on his affinity with classical painting. At Universities he teaches "Dancing with Light" technique - an expanded into Motion Picture version of Ansel Adams method of Previsualization where Mind Image is translated into elements of cinematography (Light, Lens, Exposure, Cam Angle/Movement, Color) and recreated on film as its exact reflection. Michelangelo once said: "Its in this stone.... I just need to bring it out"... As long as it is in your mind "Dancing with Light" technique will help you bringing it out.