About Me
Lighting Supervisor and Technical Director with over 10 years of experience designing and deploying scalable animation pipelines for world-class studios. Known for a creative problem-solving approach and rapid adaptability, I thrive on deconstructing complex problems and engineering the tools necessary to overcome them. I bridge the gap between creative goals and technical execution, developing robust Python frameworks and tools that empower hundreds of artists globally.
Experience
DreamWorks Animation
Lighting & Compositing Department Supervisor
Nov 2017 - Current
✅ Responsibilities
- Overseeing technical architecture, pipeline strategy, and quality standards for Lighting & Comp on all DreamWorks TV productions.
- Engineering robust object-oriented Python libraries which supercharge our development iteration speeds.
- Designing and developing Python-based software and tools deployed to hundreds of artists globally, utilizing PyQt, USD, ShotGrid, etc.
- Utilizing my deep knowledge of DCCs such as Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Unreal Engine, etc to realize new and creative workflows.
- Bridging communication between internal teams and vendors to align technical solutions with creative goals and ensure efficient production workflows.
- Managing an in-house team of lighting artists and TDs on day-to-day tasks and long-term R&D projects.
📈 Key Projects
- Developed a USD backed, sequence based lighting and rendering pipeline in a game engine for episodic production.
- Aligned multiple departments codebases to use our core libraries, greatly cutting down on similar and duplicate code.
- Transitioned the studio from a legacy color pipeline to ACES with OCIO along with P3 and HDR.
- Brought hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code up to modern development standards including PEP8, logging, Python 3 compatibility, unit testing, etc.
🏆 Awards
- DreamWorks Technology Champion Award (2026) for TV Lighting & Pipeline. "Awarded to an individual who, through their ideas and actions, has significantly enhanced and advanced the DreamWorks cultural values within our technical community."
- DreamWorks TechCon Team Initiative Award (2024) for my work on the DreamWorks TV Game Engine Pipeline.
- Advancing the DWATV Animation Pipeline (2019) award for my creation of the Lighting Handoff Tool which automated all steps in between Animation and Lighting.
Doodle Picture Studio
Lighting Technical Artist
Aug 2015 - Aug 2017
- Lighting, rendering, and compositing for various LEGO projects including story animations, product features, and key visuals.
- Look development, sequence lighting, and shot lighting with Maya, Redshift, and Fusion.
- Designed creative solutions for problems that arose in production such as memory limitations, volumetric rendering issues, etc.
Education
Cogswell College
BA Digital Arts and Animation
2011 - 2015
- Worked on student film projects including Trouble Brewing.
- Lead a team of artists on MediaWorks projects where we pitched and delivered short video projects for real world clients.
