As a child growing up in east Texas I was enthralled with art and animation. My parents encouraged an early talent for painting by allowing me to create decorations such as a polar bear and ‘Yoda Claus’ for our annual Christmas display of over 200,000 lights. I also made a hobby out of shooting short films on our home camcorder; several of which were animated starring my Star Wars figurines.

In high school, I developed a love of storytelling while participating in the drama club. Encouragement from my director led me to pursue a degree in Radio Television Film at the University of Texas. While attending UT I joined the Texas Student Television (TSTV) station where I worked on live news, sports and talk shows. I was quickly promoted to Operations Director and during my senior year at UT I was elected by the Texas Student Media board as Station Manager for TSTV.

During undergrad I was able to take a few animation courses and discovered that computer generated animation perfectly melded my technical skills with my love of storytelling and art. I was encouraged by one of my professors to apply to the Texas A&M Visualization Lab for graduate school to continue my study of computer animation. While at the Vis Lab I discovered a passion for rigging. I quickly developed my rigging skills and became the Teaching Assistant for the first dedicated Animation and Rigging course taught at Texas A&M. The summer following my second year in the master’s program I interned with EA sports on the Tiger Woods project. EA provided an opportunity to apply my technical and creative skills to the various production tools and facial rigs I worked on that summer.

In the fall of 2008, I accepted a Character TD position with DreamWorks Animation that started in the summer of 2009; I used the winter and spring to finish my thesis project. Working in Unity I developed a program capable of displaying real-time animated male fish exhibiting courtship behaviors in response to a live female fish. Real-time tracking data from the live fish was fed into the program and determined what courtship behaviors and movements the animated fish would make.

At DreamWorks Animation I continued to grow and develop new skills. The first movie I worked on, Puss In Boots, provided many challenges. My inquisitive nature lead me to enjoy diving straight into learning new work-flows and pipeline tasks as well as developing key problem-solving skills. I wanted to be able to easily tell my Mother what I worked on for Puss In Boots so I requested and received the task of rigging the bodies for the bull and boar quadrupeds in the film. I was delighted to see that the baby boars were rigged so well that they got an unplanned dance sequence in the credits.

Turbo was my second film with DreamWorks. I worked on my first human body rig for the character Angelo. I also helped to complete the body rig for the main antagonist, Guy. I danced for joy when my supervisor told me I would get to rig the character Whiplash who is a racing snail because he was being voiced by Samuel L. Jackson and I knew this would be the first character I rigged to have a toy made of it.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 was, for me, the highlight of my time at DreamWorks. As a child I read the Dragonriders of Pern book series by Anne McCaffrey and have been fascinated with dragons ever since. After seeing the first How to Train Your Dragon film I wanted desperately to work on the sequel. Luck held out; not only was I able to work on the film but I got to rig the body for the short neck generic dragon. One of the dragons featured in the film uses this rig and is a Snaffelfang named Lump.

B.O.O and Boss Baby are the last two films I worked on for DreamWorks, B.O.O. has unfortunately been canceled but I was fortunate enough to be able to do some new vehicle development for the show. I also rigged some fun ghosts with super stretchy characteristics. On Boss Baby I improved the hair tools and also worked with the new build system to develop work flows and motion systems for vehicles and props.

I took a big step with my career at the end of 2014 by shifting from rigging to character fx. I solicited and received an exciting opportunity from Sony Pictures Imageworks as a Senior Cloth and Hair Technical Director on the movie Angry Birds and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to accept the position. While on Angry Birds I was able to groom some generic bird’s' head feathers and a wonderful plateau grassland environment. I also put my rigging skills to use with dynamic set-ups for cloth and hair, after Angry Birds, I started Smurfs and continued being a key artist for grooming and hair dynamic setups.

My first VFX film was Spiderman: Homecoming. A Spiderman film is a must for anyone who works at Sony and I was honored to be one of such a tight crew of exceptional artists! I did a bit of grooming for a digital double and setup hair dynamics on collar of Vulture’s flight jacket. Homecoming was a fun, cloth heavy show and I learned so much working with digital double cloth. After Homecoming finished I was off to the world of yetis to be the cloth lead on a hair heavy show. While Smallfoot had a ton of hair we still had the main character, Percy, who needed cloth. We also did generics for the human village near the Yetis. Besides being responsible for all the cloth on the show I still helped out with all those yetis to help manage the unique pipeline that was created for the show. Once the show was finished I got the chance to co-lead a short called Super Soozie that was based on the generic yeti kids from Smallfoot.

My first role as a CFX Supervisor came with the Angry Birds 2 movie. I found it extremely fulfilling to have my first supervisor credit on the sequel to my first CFX movie! I particularly enjoy working with artists who are either new or have been underutilized; helping them develop and learn is very rewarding for me. As of 2019 I’ve been working on the VFX project Jumanji: The Next Level as the CFX lead of a four person crew. We have been pushing ourselves to create these wonderful digital ostriches which made the trailer!

Outside of work I have many hobbies to help me relax and recharge. My favorite hobby is almost certainly reading. I thoroughly enjoy the rare occasion when I get to spend all day curled up with a good sci-fi or fantasy novel. But, living in L.A. was a shocking change from Texas. With the wonderful year round weather my husband and I got into backpacking out to camp in the back country and British Columbia has provided some great experiences. My favorite trip was back near LA though, we spent the weekend at Joshua Tree National park; although lugging 40 pounds of gear and water was an experience that I can wait to repeat. My other hobbies include knitting, playing small indie video games, meeting with a group of friends for board game nights, and keeping up to date with Dr Who.