Award-winning animator Patricia Beckmann has been named chair of the animation department in the School of Film and Digital Media at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
She is overseeing the departments new major in animation, which launched in fall 2003 along with majors in broadcast design, interactive design and game development and visual as well as an undergraduate degree program in sound design.
After several years in journalism, Beckmann started her animation career as a traditional animator with Phillips Media using high-end software packages and SGI hardware maintenance, then worked for Warner Bros. Pictures, doing computer graphic effects and animation for films including BATMAN (1989) and MARS ATTACKS (1996).
Among other projects, Beckmann worked as art director on interactive cartoon projects for DreamWorks (CHICKEN RUN), ABC (NORM), New Line Cinema, E!Online and Coca-Cola. She also managed the computer graphics development department at Film Roman, creating new looks and techniques for cartoon production.
WON & TWOO, the first offering from her production company Bunsella Films, was featured on 'Best of the Internet' on Channel 5 in the U.K.
In 1999, she received the Emerging Artist Award in the Rico Gallery Fine Arts Competition and was one of 50 artists exhibited at the famed Santa Monica Gallery. In 2001, she was awarded the 'Top 25 Women of the Web' award by the San Francisco Women of the Web (www.sfwow.org). In 2000, she received an honorable mention from the Playboy Animation fest for MATILDA, a short about a Russian woman obsessed with her self-proclaimed attractiveness. The short led to a television pilot production for Oxygen Media, GERTRUDAH AND HER GRANDMOTHERS.
Also an author, Beckmann is writing three computer graphics books with Thompson Learning. The first book, on Alias Maya software, is due out in spring 2004.
Beckmann received her M.F.A. in cinema from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Bowling Green University and a B.A. in journalism from American University.
The Savannah College of Art and Design, located in Savannah, Georgia, is a private, non-profit, accredited, tax-exempt institution. Majors are offered in animation, architecture, architectural history, art history, broadcast design, fashion, fibers, film and television, furniture design, graphic design, historic preservation, illustration, industrial design, interactive design and game development, interior design, media and performing arts, metals and jewelry, painting, photography, sequential art, sound design and visual effects. For more information, please call (912) 525-5100 or (800) 869-7223 or check out www.scad.edu.
