Douglas Hudson is a multimedia artist, musician and educator. Hudson is associate professor and chair of the Student Academy Award-winning animation department he established for the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004.

His minimalist approach to animation ranges from stream of consciousness abstraction to short narratives using hand drawn, digital and stop motion techniques. He also produces and composes all the sound and music for his films.

At Warner Brothers in Glendale, Calif., he animated for the online Flash-based cartoons Gotham Girls and Lobo and was a member of the first team of animators to produce original Looney Tunes shorts for the Internet in 2000-2001.

Hudson earned a B.F.A. degree in animation from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an M.F.A. degree in experimental animation from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia under the mentorship of Jules Engel.

Hudson is currently working on a new film about snakes, tall grass and one very unfortunate bird. Entitled “Tale of the Naïve,” the film's expected release date is January 2012.

Douglas Hudson on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/doughudson

After graduating cum laude from Syracuse University in 1995 with a B.F.A. degree in illustration, Liz Van Verth moved to Brooklyn, NY. Soon after arriving in the city, she established a position in network news at NBC. After demonstrating excellence in learning and implementing digital technology, Liz progressed from still graphic artist for the Nightly News to 3-D animator for Dateline.
 
Much of her commercial work encompasses reenactment and medical animation as well as freelance design for clients that include MTV, Manhattan Transfer, Inc., Team V Creative and Writers and Readers Publishers.  In 2005 her animation was featured in the Pratt Manhattan Gallery show, "Cut and Construction," demonstrating a complicated dress pattern by Madeline Vionnet.

In May 2007, Van Verth received an M.F.A. degree with distinction and honors in outstanding merit in digital arts from Pratt Institute. Her thesis animation "Par Avion" won best concept at the Pratt Show. It has screened at the Brooklyn International Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival, NYC ACM SIGGRAPH METROCAF, San Francisco Women’s Film Festival and Kansas City Filmmaker’s Jubilee.

Today, Van Verth continues to create freelance commercial animation as well as her own personal work in her spare time. In 2009, she participated in Art Sounds at KCAI with musicians from the Pangea Piano Project, Blas Gonzalez and Ya-Ting Liou. She also hopes to help promote and feature animation and technology more prominently in the Kansas City art community. Her main focus, of course, is to teach digital animation and technology to her students and help them pursue the many diverse career opportunities in animation.

John Baker joined KCAI in 2010 and teaches courses in digital media and animation. Previously he was an animator with MK12, a Kansas City-based motion graphics firm, where he was responsible for generating concepts for clients from storyboards to final animation and worked as editor and data manager on national and international film and video production. At MK12 he was responsible for shooting footage, including client work and internal short films, and he handled filming and processing green-screen footage, rotoscope work and various visual effects. Before that he was an animator with Video Post Productions in Kansas City, where he worked in 2-D and 3-D animation for national and international clients. He has worked on projects for the Salvation Army, Oregon Lottery, Microsoft, BBDO, Harmonix, Swiss Air International, Fox Television, Mastercard, Universal Pictures and Budweiser, to name just a few.

Andrew E. Wilson, lecturer, has worked as an award-winning senior and lead video game artist for 21 years for companies such as Rockstar Games, Sony Entertainment, Midway Games, Collective Studios and Double Helix Studios.