DR. TANINE ALLISON

LEGACIES OF INEQUITY IN MOTION CAPTURE AND DIGITAL IMAGEMAKING 

Dr. Tanine Allison is a regular contributor to the Society for Animation Studies and serves as Associate Professor and Arthur Blank NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Her research and teaching focus on CGI, visual effects, and animation, with particular attention to digital performance technologies such as motion and performance capture, digital de-aging, AI and deepfakes, and morphing. 

She is the author of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2018), which examines how on-screen combat can be both aesthetically and politically radical. Her current research explores how conceptions of race and gender shape the casting and design of computer-generated characters, investigating the racial formations underlying many of Hollywood’s most prolific and celebrated figures—from Gollum to Avatar to Black Panther. Find more details on Dr. Allison at: www.tanineallison.com

BRENDAN BURCH & WENDY WILLIS

‘FROM SCREEN TO COMMUNITY: ANIMATION AND ITS ROLE IN THE PUBLIC DIALOGUE.’ 

Brendan Burch is an Academy Award–winning, Emmy-nominated producer, animation executive, and nonprofit founder whose work spans television, film, and digital media. He is the founder and CEO of Six Point Harness, an animation studio he launched in 2003 that has produced acclaimed projects for Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, Disney, Fox, Amazon, and Adult Swim. Over the past two decades, Six Point Harness has been behind series and films including Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Guava Island, Atlanta, Apollo Gauntlet, The Boys, and the Academy Award–winning short Hair Love, which won Best Animated Short Film in 2019.

Brendan has long championed creator-driven animation. He helped launch the breakout series Dick Figures, which has amassed over 1 billion views and expanded into a successful feature film funded through Kickstarter, helping define an early model for the creator economy in animation.

In 2023, Brendan founded Now What!?, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) animation nonprofit dedicated to demystifying politics, policy, and civic participation through short-form animated storytelling. Created in response to rising polarization and civic disengagement, Now What!? uses humor, clarity, and culture-forward animation to make complex issues accessible to modern audiences across social platforms.
Brendan currently lives in Pittsburgh and is a graduate of CalArts’ Character Animation program.

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Wendy Willis is a creative producer who has worked in features, television and digital media for over two decades, developing both comedies and dramas alike. Most recently, Wendy was the Executive Producer on the animated series, OMG Yes: A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances for Adult Swim and the animated short, Yoppaman (in development as an animated special), created by Zack Fox and produced in conjunction with GILGA. She served as the Head of Development for the animation studio, Six Point Harness, from 2016-2024 and helped oversee projects such as the Oscar-winning short, Hair Love, and Adult Swim’s Apollo Gauntlet, among others. Prior to Six Point, she was a development executive at Mosaic where she oversaw a slate of projects under their first-look deal at HBO and also spearheaded the company’s first theater project with Crescendo Productions. Earlier in her career, Wendy worked for Lorne Michaels at Saturday Night Live and at Mopo Productions where she helped produce the Oscar-winning short documentary, The Twin Towers. Wendy serves on the board of Now What?! Animation, a nonprofit which aims to demystify policy and politics for young voters through animation.

Presently, Wendy works as the Assistant Director for the Master of Fine Arts Program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA where she lives with her dog and husband. She’s finishing her first book, working on several animated projects and continues to perfect her focaccia recipe.