AAA Founding Members

Vice President, Current Series Animation at Nickelodeon

Claudia Spinelli is Vice President of Current Series Animation for Nickelodeon and Executive in Charge of Production on SpongeBob SquarePants. Joining the Nickelodeon team in 2000, Claudia has worked on a variety of Nick’s animated shows including Harvey Beaks, Sanjay and Craig, Robot and Monster, Rabbids Invasion, Get Blake!, Avatar, Jimmy Neutron, The Fairly OddParents, Random! Cartoons, Making Fiends, and Planet Sheen, among others.

Since 2002 her work on SpongeBob SquarePants has extended beyond the show as she reviews and often helps to initiate projects throughout other areas of the company, always with an eye toward maintaining consistency in SpongeBob’s voice and integrity of the property.

Claudia has a BFA in film from NYU. She also earned an MFA in Animation and Digital Arts from USC, where later she taught a class on Introductory Principles of Motion for Animation for the Interactive Media Department.  In between her degrees Claudia held a number of positions in various animation houses in NYC on commercials and short films.

Freelance Animator

The son of a rabbi and a seismologist, Jacob Kafka grew up in Massachusetts and has been making movies since he was five years old. He studied film and animation at NYU, and now works as a freelance animator in New York. He was lead animator on the feature documentary MONKEY BUSINESS: THE ADVENTURES OF CURIOUS GEORGE'S CREATORS. His animated short films BASED ON A TRUE STORY and COLD FEET have played in festivals such as TIFF Kids, Woodstock Film Festival, Animation Block Party, ASIFA-East Animation Festival, and been featured on Cartoon Brew. He developed the animation software ROUGHANIMATOR for mobile devices, which has been used by thousands of animators around the world.

Community Engagement Engineer, Adobe Creative Cloud

Erin Finnegan is currently a Community Engagement Engineer at Adobe Creative Cloud in New York City. Erin received her BFA from TSOA in 2001, and earned an MPS at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications department in 2015. She worked on Codename; Kids Next Door, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Click & Clack's As the Wrench turns, as a Production Coordinator, Post Production Coordinator, and Script Supervisor before returning to NYU in 2010 as an Animation Technician.

Erin has written about Japanese cartoons and comics for several publications, including Otaku USA magazine, Animenewsnetwork.com, and Publishers Weekly.

Erin's unusual zero gravity wedding is featured in the 2011 Guinness Book of World Records.  While at ITP, she received a Google Experiments in Storytelling Grant for "Twitch Plays Shakespeare".

VFX Artist, Germany

Ian Hutchinson grew up in upstate New York surrounded by forests, mountains and an ever growing collection of movies and comic books.  The love of stories both moving and still led him to studying film at NYU with a focus in traditional animation.  His animated thesis film required a fair amount of digital compositing which  helped him launch a career as a freelance animator/compositor in NYC. During this time he had the good fortune to work with many of the top post production studios and design boutiques in the city.  In 2007 curiosity and a bit of luck landed him in Berlin, Germany where he continues to work in post production as an After Effects artist and pursues personal projects in the form of short films and fine arts.

CG Character Animator, DreamWorks Animation

Garrett Lewis is a CG Character Animator working at DreamWorks Animation studios.  After graduating in 2013, Garrett spent about a year freelancing in NYC at The Artery VFX.  He later moved out to Los Angeles and worked as a video game animator at F84 Games.  In 2015, Garrett got a job at DreamWorks as an Animation TA and now he’s a Character Animator for the studio working on Everest and How To Train Your Dragon 3.

Traditional Animator, Glen Keane Animation

Aidan Terry is an artist, animator, and filmmaker living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He graduated from NYU Tisch in 2016, and since then has worked for Glen Keane on 2017's "Dear Basketball" and a short project for Riot Games, as well as with Vincent Rogozyk and Claire Keane on a 360° film for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. He is currently freelancing as a traditional hand-drawn animator.

Art Director, Designer, Animator - Freelance

Will Robertson is a freelance art director, designer, and animator based in NYC. He's worked for various studios, including The Mill, Psyop, and Fake Love.

After graduating in 2015, Nico headed to the Pacific Northwest to craft puppets for Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link. After a stop through Atlanta to puppet-make on Bento Box's Moon and Me, he returned to New York and began working at Hornet Inc shortly after. Nico is currently a Production Coordinator at Hornet working on a variety of commercial projects.

Stop Motion Animator

Sarah de Gaudemar is an NYU UGFTV alumnus with 20 years experience in the industry. She's been an animator on a wide variety of feature films, TV series, short films, web series, and commercials. Though she's worked in many different types of animation, including pixilation, cg animation, motion graphics, and puppetry, her true passion is stop motion animation. In this niche corner of the animation industry, her more notable credits include "Coraline", "Anomalisa", and "Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas".

Sarah's work has taken her to three different continents and such well known studios as MTV, Will Vinton Studios, Clokey Productions, and most recently Animal Logic, where she animated on the CG feature "The Lego Batman Movie". In 2006, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for her work on "Robot Chicken". She also animated on the "Robot Chicken: Star Wars" specials and still has the lightsaber gifted to her by George Lucas

Writer, Disney Television Animation

After graduating from Tisch, Kendall moved to Los Angeles to work at DreamWorks Animation. As a script and editorial coordinator on Kung Fu Panda 3 and Trolls, she honed her story skills, which led to writing a freelance episode of The Lion Guard for Disney Jr. After Trolls, Kendall left DreamWorks to join Disney Television Animation full time, where she's been a staff writer on seasons 2 and 3 of The Lion Guard.

Production Coordinator, Disney Television Animation

After graduating from NYU Tisch Film & Television in 2014, Amelia moved westward to Los Angeles where she began working in children’s television, starting at Disney Channels Worldwide and eventually moving into a production track at Disney Television Animation, working on the original series “Elena of Avalor”. Outside of animation, Amelia is a rock climber, costume maker, adventurer, artist and much much more.

Show Runner, Disney TV, Warner Brothers Animation

Sam Levine is a professional animation producer, director, artist, writer and voice-over actor with over twenty-three years of experience in the industry. After graduating NYU Film, he moved to Los Angeles beginning a twelve-year tenure at Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios. Levine first worked as a traditional clean-up artist and assistant animator on Hercules, Fantasia 2000 and Tarzan, and was then promoted to story artist on Treasure Planet, Bolt and Home On The Range (where he was also cast to voice the villain’s nephew minions, The Willie Brothers). Levine provided character design and visual development, as well as assuming the role of Story Supervisor, Writer and Director various development projects before deciding to move on and try his skills in the world of TV Animation.

At Nickelodeon, Levine storyboarded and directed a pilot for Nickelodeon, which green- lit the CG animated series Robot & Monster into production. While directing 15 episodes of the series, Levine also sold and developed his own original project to Nickelodeon.

Also around this time, Levine was story consultant on several projects, from Gnomeo and Juliet to working on an unrealized project in Israel. Levine also developed several other TV and Feature projects around town, building relationships and honing his craft. After observing how to run a show at Nickelodeon, Levine returned to the Disney Company to develop and co-create his own original animated series for the next six Years.

Levine was Executive Producer and Supervising Director of Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero at Disney Television Animation, which ran two seasons on Disney XD. Levine was show runner, leading a team of writers, directors and artists; defining the show’s unique aesthetically traditional 2D style, using asset-based Harmony Software, achieving a full animation look with complex textures and a ‘hand-drawn’- styled line. Levine supervised all aspects of production, from the story to the art style and editing, also visiting and directing overseas vendor studios in both Canada and The Philippines. Levine also wrote a dozen episode scripts as well as many original songs for the series; both music and lyrics. He directed voice actors and provided voices of the series’ twin mentor characters, Phyllis and Phil. As of late 2017, Sam is developing new projects at Warner Brothers Animation.

Zoya Baker is an award-winning filmmaker and animator based in New York City.

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