Directory Profile

Jason Reisig is currently a professor of Animation at University of Southern California. Jason was the co-director on the 2018 Warner Brothers feature animation Smallfoot. With over 20 years in feature animation, Jason spent most of his career with DreamWorks Animation. He was the Head of Character Animation on Home and the final chapter in the Shrek series, Shrek Forever After. For the latter he was nominated for a VES Award in the category of “Outstanding Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture”. Concurrently, as the Animation Department Chair at DreamWorks, he worked on the interaction design of DreamWork’s NextGen character animation software, Premo, for which he recently received a SciTech Technical Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Jason was also a supervising animator on the animated features, Trolls, Kung Fu Panda 3, Kung Fu Panda, and Over the Hedge. 

Jason is a graduate from Art Center College of Design in illustration, and did a traditional animation internship at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Florida. He started his production career in 1996 at PDI, where he animated on Antz and the Academy Award winning Shrek. In the latter, Jason was nominated for an Annie Award in the category of "Outstanding Achievement by an Individual in Character Animation". In 2002, he went to Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he was a lead animator on Spider-man 2. 

Since Jason has been at USC, he directed an animated short Bug Therapy (2022). He also worked as a Director of Animation at a start-up VR production company Mindshow. There he oversaw all animation done at the studio, directed many episodics, and helped develop the workflow and pipeline that uses VR as the production tool to create animated content. Currently Jason has been a consultant at DNEG Studio where his main role is teaching master-classes to the new hires of the animation department.

Jason has been an Academy member in the feature animation branch, since 2015. He currently resides in Manhattan Beach, California with his wife Rachel, They have  two adult children Emma (SCA Film/TV Prod grad '21) and Aidan (Echerd College grad '24).