Moving Pictures Group Lead, Pixar Animation Studios (San Francisco)

Dr. Michael B. Johnson leads the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar Animation Studios. His group is responsible for the design, implementation and support of the pre-production pipeline for Pixar features and shorts.

This includes Story, Editorial, Art and the review process. His team works directly with the directors, editors, producers, production designers, art directors, artists and production folks who help begin the process of bringing Pixar stories to the screen.

Dr. Johnson has been at Pixar since 1993. He started off doing R&D for its (now defunct) Interactive Division, and has been working directly on feature films since A Bug's Life. He has written tools for all of Pixar's feature films, including pre-viz, animation, layout, modeling, lighting, rendering, as well as storyboarding and editorial pipeline tools.

Prior to Pixar, Michael attended the University of Illinois where he earned his undergraduate degree. He studied abroad for a year and Swansea, Wales and also worked for NCSA, Thinking Machines, IBM and MIT’s Media Lab.

He did his PhD at the MIT Media Lab, where Dr. Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) was on his thesis committee.