Ed Catmull

Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia, United States, and moved with his family to Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of two. In the 1950s he loved Disney animated films such as Pinocchio and Peter Pan, dreamed of becoming an animator, filled up sketchbooks, and made his own flipbooks; at Granite High School in Salt Lake City he took every art class he could, and his heroes were Walt Disney and Albert Einstein.⁠[1][2][2][2]

After enrolling at the University of Utah, Catmull concluded that he could not draw well enough, and there was no school for animation at the time, so he switched to physics. In his final undergraduate year he turned to the newly established Department of Computer Science, and in 1969 he earned two bachelor’s degrees, in physics and computer science, just four years after finishing high school. After graduating he worked briefly for Boeing in Seattle; when Boeing laid off large numbers of employees during an economic crisis, he returned to the University of Utah for graduate school.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

The first course Catmull took as a graduate student was the brand-new course in computer graphics. The University of Utah’s computer science department was then led by David Evans and conducted open-ended research funded by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA); Evans and Ivan Sutherland recruited a group of graduate students, Catmull among them. From 1970 he was part of the University of Utah’s ARPA program, where he came up with the first method to display curved surfaces on a computer; before that, computer-generated images consisted only of straight lines and polygons. He also invented Z-buffering, used to determine which parts of an object are visible, and texture mapping, which adds realism to computer graphics.⁠[2][2][2][3][3]

In 1972, for a class assignment, Catmull chose not to use the canned software and wrote his own program to create a roughly one-minute three-dimensional animation of his left hand moving, later known as A Computer Animated Hand, one of the earliest works of computer animation. The effort gave him a new goal in life: to produce an animated film.⁠[3][2][2][2]

In 1974, Catmull earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah with the dissertation “A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces,” and then joined the New York Institute of Technology as director of its Computer Graphics Lab, assembling a team to develop tools for 2-D and then 3-D animation.⁠[2][4][2]

In 1976, Catmull’s hand animation appeared in the science-fiction film Futureworld.⁠[2]

After five years at the New York Institute of Technology, Catmull was hired by George Lucas in 1979 as vice president of Lucasfilm’s computer division, with the task of bringing computer graphics, computer audio, and digital editing to the film industry. At Lucasfilm he managed development in computer graphics, video editing, video games, and digital audio, and his team developed digital image compositing technology as well as the precursor to the RenderMan rendering software.⁠[2][2][2][5][2]

In 1986, Lucasfilm spun off its digital division as an independent company, which Steve Jobs funded and purchased, becoming Pixar; the corporation had been incorporated in California on December 9, 1985. Catmull co-founded the company with Alvy Ray Smith and is also listed, together with Jobs and John Lasseter, as a co-founder of Pixar. He served as chief technical officer from the company’s inception, and that same year hired Patrick Hanrahan as one of its first employees. Pixar’s collaboration with Disney also began in 1986, developing the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) for Disney.⁠[2][6][6][7][6][3][7]

Catmull later recalled that the change meant he was no longer just running a research group but running a company, learning how to keep people engaged and how to handle issues with managing people. In its early years Pixar produced commercials and established RenderMan as the industry standard for 3-D imaging.⁠[2][2]

In 1992, Catmull received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as part of the team that developed the RenderMan software; in 1995 he received the award again as part of a team responsible for pioneering inventions in digital image compositing.⁠[8]

In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the world’s first feature-length computer-animated film, achieving the goal Catmull had held since childhood. One week after the film’s release, Pixar went public in the biggest IPO of the year. Catmull later said that having reached his goal he felt a little lost and did not want to go into “coasting mode” after that.⁠[7][9][2][2]

Having watched companies of smart people in Silicon Valley rise and then collapse, he set out to study how to keep a sustainable creative culture at Pixar after its success. One of his management principles was to attract smart people and make it safe for them to create; he also advocated making RenderMan an open development interface and freely publishing research results.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In 2000, Catmull, Rob Cook, and Loren Carpenter received an Academy Award of Merit, an Oscar statuette, for their advancements to motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar’s RenderMan.⁠[8]

In January 2001, Catmull moved from chief technical officer to president of Pixar. By early 2006, Pixar’s executive team included Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, President Catmull, and Executive Vice President, Creative John Lasseter, among others.⁠[6][6][6]

In 2005, Catmull shared an Academy Technical Achievement Award; that same year the University of Utah awarded him an honorary doctoral degree in engineering.⁠[8][8]

On January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it would acquire Pixar in an all-stock transaction, issuing 2.3 Disney shares for each Pixar share, with a transaction value of $7.4 billion ($6.3 billion net of Pixar’s cash of just over $1 billion). Under the arrangement, Catmull would serve as president of the combined Pixar and Disney animation studios, reporting to Disney CEO Robert Iger and Dick Cook, chairman of The Walt Disney Studios; Lasseter would be chief creative officer of the two studios. Catmull said in a statement: “Pixar’s culture of collaboration and innovation has its roots in Disney Animation.”⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

On May 5, 2006, Disney completed its acquisition of Pixar, and Catmull formally became president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. He and Lasseter were tasked with reenergizing Disney Animation, and Catmull applied the ideas developed at Pixar to a group of people he had not known before. Under his leadership the two studios went on to release films grossing more than $1 billion, including Frozen, Zootopia, Toy Story 3, Finding Dory, and Incredibles 2, as well as works such as WALL-E, Up, Inside Out, Coco, Tangled, and Moana.⁠[11][11][2][2][7]

On February 7, 2009, at its Scientific and Technical Awards presentation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Catmull with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in computer graphics for the motion picture industry; he was the 22nd recipient since the award was established. Academy President Sid Ganis called him one of the rare individuals who can bridge the space between science and art.⁠[8][8][5][8][8]

In 2011, A Computer Animated Hand was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. That same year, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) awarded Catmull its Progress Medal for his pioneering contributions to computer-generated imagery for the motion picture industry.⁠[2][5]

In 2012, Catmull gave the University of Utah’s commencement address, telling graduates: “We should plan for the unforeseen, not prevent it.” That same year he was inducted as a Visual Effects Society Fellow. He has long been involved with the University of Utah and is a past chair of its Engineering National Advisory Council.⁠[2][2][5][2]

In 2013, the Computer History Museum named Catmull a Fellow for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation, and filmmaking.⁠[5]

On April 8, 2014, Random House published Creativity, Inc., a management book by Catmull with Amy Wallace. The book recounts Pixar’s rise and his long working relationship with Steve Jobs and describes the practices he established to protect creativity, such as the “Braintrust,” in which directors receive blunt feedback, “Notes Day,” and daily reviews of work in progress (“dailies”); it states: “early on, all of our movies suck.”⁠[12][12][12][4][4][9]

Beginning in 2014, animation workers brought a class action alleging that several major animation studios had conspired through non-poaching agreements to hold down the wages of artists and technical employees, in violation of antitrust laws; the plaintiffs said the agreements originated in the 1980s with an agreement not to court each other’s employees between George Lucas and Catmull, then president of the newly formed Pixar. As of January 31, 2017, Disney, Pixar, and Lucasfilm had agreed to a $100 million settlement with the plaintiffs; several other defendant studios had previously reached separate settlements.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

On October 23, 2018, Catmull, then 73, announced that he would step down as president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios at the end of the year and remain in an advisory role through July 2019, marking exactly 40 years since he was hired at Lucasfilm. The two studios would thereafter be overseen by Pixar President Jim Morris and Walt Disney Animation Studios President Andrew Millstein, respectively. Disney CEO Bob Iger said Catmull’s impact on the entertainment industry is “immeasurable.”⁠[7][14][7][14]

On March 18, 2020, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Catmull and Patrick Hanrahan would share the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery in filmmaking and other applications. The Turing Award carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google; the award ceremony was scheduled for June 20, 2020, in San Francisco.⁠[1][3][15][15]

On June 14, 2026, David Senra’s podcast released an interview with Catmull covering his path from wanting to be a Disney animator as a child to achieving the goal of a fully computer-animated feature film, as well as his management philosophy of protecting early creative ideas.⁠[9][9][9]

Catmull founded three leading centers of computer graphics research: the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, and Pixar. These institutions produced foundational work including image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering, texture mapping, and the Z-buffer. He is one of the architects of the RenderMan rendering software; as of early 2009, it had been used in 45 of the last 50 films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.⁠[5][5][5][8]

Catmull is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the ACM, and a member of the IEEE Computer Society since 1978; he has long participated in the ACM SIGGRAPH conference and served as a member or chair of its papers, awards, and other committees. His other honors include the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, the SMPTE Fuji Gold Medal, the animation industry’s Ub Iwerks Award, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and the inaugural Randy Pausch Prize from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in 2008.⁠[6][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]