Edwin (Ed) Catmull – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES

Edwin (Ed) Catmull

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Most Recent Affiliation(s):


  • Pixar

Other / Past Affiliation(s):


  • The Walt Disney Company
  • Lucasfilm
  • New York Institute of Technology (NYIT)

Location:


  • Emeryville, California, United States of America

Bio:

  • Updated 2025

    Ed Catmull, President, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, retired.

    Dr. Catmull is an ACM Turing Award Laureate and has received five Academy Awards, including two Oscars for his work and a Lifetime Achievement Award.

    Dr. Ed Catmull was co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and served as President of Pixar for 33 years and Walt Disney Animation Studios for 13 of those 33 years. He was previously Vice President of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm Ltd., where he was hired to bring high technology to the entertainment industry, particularly computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio.

    Catmull’s New York Times bestseller, “CREATIVITY, INC.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration,” which Fast Company described as “what just might be the most thoughtful management book ever,” was published by Random House in 2014. The Expanded Edition of the book was released in June 2023.

    He founded three of the leading centers of computer graphics research – including the Computer Division of Lucasfilm Ltd. and Pixar Animation Studios. These organizations have been home to many of the most academically respected researchers in the field and have produced some of the most fundamental advances in computer graphics, including image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping, and the z-buffer. He is one of the architects of the RenderMan rendering software, which has been used in over 90% of Academy Award® winners for Visual Effects over the past 20 years.

    He is active in several professional organizations and has been a dedicated participant in ACM SIGGRAPH for 50 years. He is also a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Visual Effects Society, and he has received numerous awards from these organizations.

    Dr. Catmull earned B.S. degrees in physics and computer science and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah.

    After setting up successors, he retired as President of Pixar and Disney Animation on Jan 1, 2019, and is active in consulting and speaking.

    Face and Hand Animation

    Statement by Ed Catmul regarding the Hand and Face animation produced Fred Parke and Ed Catmul in 1971:
    “Fred and I took our first graphics course in the Fall of 1970. In the Spring, Ivan Sutherland began to teach it, and that was when Fred and I started our respective films. As I recall, we were the only two students in the course to ignore the software they provided, and wrote our own. We were also the only two who continued on in computer graphics.

    It took a while to write our respective papers in order to get them published in the Proceedings of the ACM in 1972.”

    See: “A system for computer generated movies” by Edwin Catmull https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800193.569952
    See: “Computer generated animation of faces” by Frederick I Parke https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800193.569955

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