Pixar Animation Career Chat
Career Chat With Pixar Animation Studios
In association with Pixar Animation Studios, we are delighted to present a virtual Career Chat event hosted by Audrey Cooper, Editor in Chief, WNYC Radio. This is an amazing opportunity for girls to learn about various careers in animation and ask questions of women role models from Pixar Animation Studios.
Audience: Girls ages 10-15
When: Monday, January 10, 2022 at 5:00 pm PT/ 8 pm ET (75 minute program)
What: Career Chat – Free virtual event, advance registration required
Who: Women from Pixar Animation Studios
Audrey Cooper, Career Chat Host
Audrey Cooper is Editor in Chief and VP of News for WNYC/New York Public Radio, a role she assumed in July 2020. Formerly she was the editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, the first woman to fill the role in the company’s 154-year history. Under her leadership, the Chronicle won nearly every major national journalism prize, including more than a dozen Emmy awards. San Francisco magazine has named Audrey one of the city’s most powerful women. Editor and Publisher magazine named her one of the world’s “Top 10 Women to Watch” and Advertising Age named her one of their “Top 40 under 40.” A native of the Kansas City area, Audrey graduated magna cum laude from Boston University, which has honored her as a distinguished alumna.
Art: Laura Meyer
Laura Meyer, Graphics Art Director and Title Designer, joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2008. She has worked on international graphics and title and end credit design for a number of Pixar titles, including Academy Award®-winning feature films “Up,” “Toy Story 3,” and “Brave,” “Inside Out,” “Coco,” and “Toy Story 4.” She recently worked on graphics and title and end credit design for Pixar’s “Soul” and “Onward” In addition to serving as the Graphics Art Director for Pixar’s newest feature film “Turning Red” releasing in theaters March 22, 2022.
Meyer has also contributed to international GFX and title and end credit design for a number of Pixar theatrical shorts including “Partly Cloudy,” “Day and Night,” “La Luna,” and Academy Award®-winning shorts “Piper” and “Bao.” More recently she has worked on logo and end credit design for Pixar SparkShorts “Purl,” “Smash & Grab,” “Kitbull,” “Wind,” and “Loop”.
Prior to Pixar, Meyer worked as an Art Director/Designer for a gift bag publishing company as well as a Graphic Designer for the Oakland A’s. Raised in Sonoma County, CA, she attended Ursuline High School in Santa Rosa and went on to study at Santa Rosa Junior College and Academy of Art University.
Meyer currently resides in Windsor, CA.
Lighting: Kim White
Kim White joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1997 as a part of the set modeling and lighting teams on “A Bug’s Life.” Since then she has worked on several feature films including “Toy Story 2” and “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille.” White served as the Director of Photography, Lighting on “Toy Story 3” and “Inside Out” as well as 2017’s “Cars 3.” Most recently, White served again as Director of Photography on the feature film “Luca,” released in 2021.
Prior to joining the studio, White worked at Sierra On-Line helping to create computer adventure games. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute, and continued on to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her Masters in Fine Arts.
Born in Georgia but raised in Lakewood, Colorado, White loved art from an early age and was inspired by classic Disney animated movies. As her love of art persisted she was encouraged by both her parents and high school art teacher to pursue art as a career. She currently resides in Orinda, CA.
Systems/TD: Holly Lloyd
Holly Lloyd, Sequence Lead and Generalist Technical Director, joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1996. She has since held a variety of roles, starting in technology as a compression technician for interactive games, moving on to Production Manager and Line Producer. Holly then pivoted toward technology and worked as a Lighting Technical Director on features and in Marketing, and most recently as a generalist technical director and Sequence Lead on Toy Story 4, Soul, Luca, and now a new streaming series coming out in 2023 called Win or Lose. Before Pixar, Holly was a web designer, journalist, editor and architectural designer.
Art: Jennifer Chang
Chia-Han Jennifer Chang is a Taiwanese American artist living in San Francisco. She has worked at Pixar Animation Studios since 2005, she has contributed as a Sketch Artist in a variety of feature film productions, including Wall-e, Monster University, Up, Toy Story 3, The Good Dinosaur, Coco, Cars 2 &3, Inside Out, Onward, and also, as a Color & Shading Art director on Luca, and she is currently working as a Sets Color & Shading Art Director on an up-coming feature production for 2023.
Through the on-going pandemic, she’s grateful of many things, including the relatively good health her family have been able to maintain, being able to continue to work with talented, genuinely good hearted people at Pixar remotely everyday, and being able to witness her young children’s growth closely while she helps create original films in socks from home.
Animation: Becki Tower
Becki Tower joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2008, and has since worked as a Character Animator on several Pixar projects, including Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, and Coco. She was the Crowds & Second Unit Animation Supervisor on Cars 3 and a Directing Animator on Toy Story 4.
In 2019, Tower was selected as an Animation Department Head at Pixar Animation Studios. As one of two animation heads, Tower oversaw all aspects of Pixar’s Animation team of over 175 artists to ensure balanced staffing, artistic development, and the nurturing of both departmental culture and depth. However, this Fall Tower chose to return to her passion of animating and jumped back into production!
Prior to Pixar, Tower worked as a character animator on Horton Hears A Who at Blue Sky Studios, and on Guitar Hero 3 at Neversoft Entertainment. Raised in Wrentham MA, she attended the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating with a BFA in computer art with a concentration in traditional animation and minors in both 3D Animation and Drawing. Tower continued her education at SCAD to earn an MFA in Character Animation.
She resides in Half Moon Bay, California.
Systems/TD: Yun Lien
Yun Lien, Lead Engineer, joined Pixar Animation Studios in October 2005, beginning in the Tools department creating the animation software used for the Academy Award©-winning feature film “Brave.” As a Technical Engineer Lead, Yun’s team manages Pixar’s Render Farm, which is a data center of machines that convert movies from software format to film. Since “Brave,” she has worked on every film the studio has released including “Monsters University,” “Inside out,” “The Good Dinosaur,” “Finding Dory,” “Cars 3,” “Coco,” and most recently “Onward”. Prior to Pixar, Yun held various Engineering and Management positions at several different startups and Oracle.
Tools Engineering: Caroline Lachanski
Caroline Lachanski, Tools Engineer, joined Pixar in 2020 as a Software Engineer on the GPU team. Before that, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science (with a focus on computer graphics). Her team works on Pixar’s core imaging software, which is used both throughout the studio and by other companies and developers via its open source license. She is passionate about the intersection of art and technology, and while she codes most of the work day, she spends much of her free time practicing her digital painting.
Tools Engineering: Deepanshi Sharma
Deepanshi Sharma, Tools Engineer, joined Pixar in June 2021 after earning her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a member of the Tools Internals team, which is responsible for the execution framework of Pixar’s proprietary animation software. Before Pixar, Deepanshi worked at the student-led Texas Spacecraft Laboratory, where she developed payload simulation software for a space debris-collecting nano-satellite (like Wall-E!) She is passionate about exploring all the unique ways technology and artistry can build on each other, and she spends most of her free time falling down various creative rabbit holes.