Joshua Bass has been in the video game industry for over a dozen years, working as both a Lead Artist and Art Department Director. He began his career at High Voltage Software in 1997, and later joined Rockstar Games in San Diego, where he currently serves as the Art Department Director. To date he has shipped 13 games on 9 different platforms, and is currently working on Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption. Joshua has also taught Master Classes to industry professionals, as well as modeling and animation principles at the university level.

Billy Cain has worked on hundreds of games over his career for such game companies as Electronic Arts, Sony, and THQ. He was a co-founder of BigSky Interactive, Critical Mass Interactive, and now Sneaky Games, a world-class game developer of Facebook games. He has spoken at many conferences and universities.

Chad is a veteran technical artist, animator, manager and director specializing in character animation for games and game cinematics. He has been creating character set-ups, MEL and Python scripts and tools as well as building art and animation pipelines. He is a two-time Autodesk
MasterClass presenter, adjunct instructor at Mount Ida College and also an advisory board member and past course director at Full Sail University. He continues to contribute to high quality game projects, focusing on art and animation pipelines and workflows. As a manager, he strives to cultivate a positive collaborative environment.

Over the last 5 years he has transitioned to a leadership role, first as a Lead, then Manager of animation at SCEA (Sony) and currently is the Technical Art Director at Turbine Games. He recently co-founded riggingmentor.com, to teach the art and science of character set up.

Tim Naylor has over 10 years of experience in the computer graphics industry, working with everything from virtual reality to high-end visual effects. He is currently a Lead Creature Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic, with film credits that have included Transformers, on which he served as Creature Supervisor, overseeing the character setup and animation tools. Naylor also worked on Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest developing the key frame rigging system for Davy Jones' tentacles, and as a Sequence Supervisor and Development Lead on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where he was responsible for character setup, creating toolsets for creature artists and animators, pipeline development, and rigid body dynamics.

Before joining ILM, Tim was a Course Director at Full Sail, where he taught Maya to students in the Computer Animation Program. His curriculum covered character design, modeling, and setup.  He has also worked for defense contractors, specializing in virtual reality technology for sophisticated military training programs.

Sumer Ortiz is the University Relations manager at Blizzard Entertainment, a role that includes managing both the internship program and new graduate talent hires. She has been involved in education for 10 years, including being an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica City College, California State University, Fresno, and Fresno City College. Sumer also served as an outreach recruiter and communications specialist in the California State University system for five years, and before entering the gaming industry, she managed the Southern California internship program at Google. Sumer has a degree in International Political Economics and a Master of Science in Counseling.

John Thornton graduated from Columbus College of Art & Design in 1989 with a BFA in Illustration. He received an internship with Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1993 and worked there creating hand-drawn effects animation on a string of high-profile films from The Lion King to Brother Bear.  In 2004, he migrated to Blue Sky Studios in metro New York City to create computer-generated effects, starting on Robots and working to his most recent credit, Rio.  In the summer of 2011, he left Blue Sky voluntarily to pursue other venues in animation and is currently working as a freelance animation professional.

Ryan has been in the video game industry for over five years, and has contributed his animation work to such titles as Wrestlemania 21, Quake 4, Wolfenstein, and Singularity. Before joining Raven Software, Ryan was a lab specialist at Full Sail and also worked in the motion graphics industry.

Jayme studied Fine Art at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Computer Science at the University of Akron, and Cinematography at Ohio State University Cranston Csuri Group (CCG). In his twenty-plus-year career, he has worked at various postproduction companies – as an industrial designer for Telxon Corporation designing portable computer equipment, at Alias|Wavefront using Autodesk® Maya® software in its earliest stages, and at Walt Disney Animation Studios where he contributed to projects like Lilo and Stitch, Brother Bear, and My Peoples as CGI lead/Technical Coordinator. He continued his career in CG animation at Electronic Arts/Tiburon where he worked as CGI Supervisor/Technical Art Director on such projects as NASCAR 2005, NASCAR 2006, and Madden 2006.

In 2006, Jayme joined Blue Sky Studios, and was Technical Supervisor on Ice Age: The Meltdown and Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears A Who. Jayme then supervised the stereoscopic 3D effort on Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Blue Sky’s first stereoscopic 3D film. Currently he is working as Stereographer/Stereoscopic Supervisor on their latest project, Rio.