About the Conference

Valérie Bernard

Animal Logic

Conference Co-Chair

Valérie leads the animation and rigging R&D team at Animal Logic. After obtaining master’s degrees in mechanical and digital engineering from Arts et Métiers ParisTech, she started her career in the VFX and animation industry in her hometown of Paris before calling Vancouver home for the past decade. She has worked at various studios including Image Engine and Sony Pictures Imageworks, nursing a growing obsession for real time rig evaluation before joining Animal Logic in 2018. She brings a passion for animation to her job designing rigging and animation technology and thrives seeing characters and fantastical creatures come to life in the creative hands of artists.

Kelsey Hurley

Walt Disney Animation Studios

Conference Co-Chair

Kelsey began her career at Walt Disney Animation Studios as an intern and has been there ever since. She is currently the Technical Supervisor for the upcoming feature film, Wish. Before that, she was the Technical Supervisor for Raya and the Last Dragon where she helped lead the effort for the studio to adopt USD throughout the entire pipeline. She also served as Technical Supervisor on Inner Workings, and Associate Technical Supervisor on Ralph Breaks the Internet. Other credits include: Strange World, Encanto, Moana, Big Hero 6, Frozen, and Wreck-it Ralph.

Kelsey loves the bridge between art and technology, problem solving, and leans in to change. She looks forward to collaborating with her team, developers, and artists to help everyone bring their vision to life.

Cyrus A Wilson

Program Co-Chair

Photo by Walt Jones

Cyrus’s journey to digital production started with filming movies through a microscope. He applied a combination of biochemistry, cell biology, video microscopy, and computer vision techniques in his Ph.D. research into molecular mechanisms of cell movement. After finishing his Ph.D., he moved into computer graphics research at USC Institute for Creative Technologies; and then into animation technology R&D: in motion pictures at Rhythm & Hues and at DreamWorks Animation, in games at Activision Blizzard, and in content creation technology at Apple. Cyrus’s favorite aspects of working in media & entertainment are the cross-disciplinary coupling of art and technology, and the highly collaborative nature of the content creation process.

Per Christensen

Pixar Animation Studios

Program Co-Chair

Per Christensen is a principal scientist in Pixar’s RenderMan group. His main research interests are efficient ray tracing and global illumination in very complex scenes. He received an M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle. Before joining Pixar, Per worked at Mental Images (now part of NVidia) in Berlin and at Square USA in Honolulu. He has contributed to several generations of Pixar’s RenderMan renderer, including the next-gen version, RenderMan XPU. His movie credits include every Pixar movie since Finding Nemo, and he has received an Academy Award for his contributions to efficient point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion.