A special visit to Pixar

Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, Kathryn has loved film for as long as she can remember and has always known that her future lay somewhere in the film industry. Entering college with the goal of becoming the next Roger Ebert, Kathryn pursued a degree in Film Studies, a program which offered extensive history and theory courses taught by Dr. Richard Neupert.

Kathryn became interested in pursuing a career in computer animation during the fall semester of her sophomore year at the university after discovering a class in Maya basics in the Dramatic Media department at UGA. The class was taught by Associate Professor Mike Hussey, who helped Kathryn develop a wide skill set in basic modeling, texturing, lighting and animation. It was in these few classes that Kathryn realized that her dream job was to be a character animator.

During the spring semester of her senior year at UGA, Kathryn was chosen to participate in a prestigious internship at the internationally-reknown Blue Sky Studios in Greenwich, CT. For three months, she worked as a Production Assistant Intern and aided the Lighting and Paint departments during crunch time on the animated feature film, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. At the end of the internship, Kathryn became one of the first interns to be asked back for a second term. Over the following three months, Kathryn assisted the animation department during their pre-production processes on Blue Sky’s most recent feature film, Rio, and helped manage a project to update the training and tutorial videos created to guide new hires and temp animators through the company’s animation pipeline.

Kathryn currently resides in Athens, GA, where she has just recently completed a certificate in character animation studies from Animation Mentor. Over the course of 18 months, Kathryn was mentored by Sean Ermey, Dimos Vrysellas, Wayne Gilbert, Ray Chase, Morgan Kelly, and Nick Bruno.

She is currently looking for part-time or full-time animation work and in the meantime is continuing her studies by working on new personal projects.