DMA Industry Advisory Board

 

The Digital Media Arts Department has an amazing Industry Advisory Board, advising us on our programs and curriculum, and helping us offer industry-standard education to our students. Our Advisors represent various areas of production within Media Arts, such as games, Films, User Experience and Graphic Design.  

 

RACHEL MIURA

Senior Program Manager, Google

Rachel Miura is a Program Management professional with experience working in a wide range of environments - from startups to Fortune 50 companies such as Apple and Google. She has held roles focused on imaging hardware and software, consumer content, and learning.  Rachel currently looks after onboarding and leadership development programs for Google Data Centers and holds degrees in Digital Imaging and Instructional Design. 

Pol Jeremias

Lead Graphics Engineer, Pixar Animation Studios

Pol Jeremias Vila is a computer graphics engineer. Pol is currently a Lead Graphics Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios where he develops algorithms to help artists make movies. Pol is credited in multiple films including Soul, Toy Story 4, Incredibles 2, Coco and Finding Dory. Prior to Pixar, Pol worked in rendering technology for multiple games including Star Wars 1313 and The Force Unleashed 2. 

Aside from his contributions to films and games, Pol is also the co-founder of Shadertoy, one of the biggest repositories of computer graphics experiments, ideas, and projects. Pol has also spoken and juried work at multiple international conferences and events, including the Game Developers Conference, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, FMX, GTC, and Eurographics. Pol has also been actively involved with SIGGRAPH, the premiere conference in computer graphics, directing the Computer Animation Festival, Real-Time Live!, the Immersive program and serving as the 2021 SIGGRAPH Conference Chair. 

AARON ROOSEVELT

Lead VFX Artist, Pocket Gems

Aaron is a Lead Visual Effects Artist specializing in AAA and mobile video games. He’s currently working at Pocket Gems, where he leads and manages the VFX production for multiple projects, including War dragons, and Adventure Chef. Prior to joining Pocket Gems, he worked on several hit franchises at EA such as Sims, Godfather, Dead Space, Dante’s Inferno and Battlefield. With over 15 years of game development experience, he’s delivered top tier visuals for all the major platforms. 

AASHIMA GOEL

Principal Product Designer, ServiceNow

Aashima Goel is a Senior Design Professional with 15+ years of experience creating compelling brand and user experiences across multiple media formats and digital platforms. She is a cross – discipline subject matter expert in information architecture, design strategy, user research & experience, interaction and visual design for Enterprise, Cloud and Mobile applications. A veteran UX professional, she has an uncanny sense for clean and scalable design, and is a fierce advocate for the user, and committed to creating elegantly simple user experiences from otherwise complex workflows.  Aashima is currently at ServiceNow, where she provides leadership, direction, and mentorship to a team of UX Designers, and leads their creative and holistic thinking platforms across diverse product releases and devices. 

SHIEW YEU LOH

Art Executive Producer, Amber Studio

Shiew Yeu Loh is the Art Executive Producer at Amber Studio where she helps with NFT and Blockchain Art Production as well as mentors the team and coaches them about the process. A game industry veteran, she started as a texture artist, a generalist and a producer in 2004 before working at Electronic Arts as the Senior External Development Artist for 14 years. During her time at the Sims, Shiew Yeu worked on Sims Nintendo Wii, Sims 3, Sims Medieval, Sims Online Store, Sims Mobile and Sims 4. In 2020, she moved onto Pocket Gems as an Art Manager to oversee the mobile game War Dragon by working with the dev team, art leadership and outsourcing vendors. She was also in charge of implementing diversity and inclusion content into their character library.  

Shiew Yeu has been a speaker at various Game Industry Conferences regarding being a mother in the game industry as well as topics that center around diversity and inclusion. Before entering the game industry, Shiew Yeu was a graphic designer and a multimedia artist for 5 years. 

Adam kelsey-giddings

Sr. Technical Artist, Double Fine Productions

Adam Kelsey began his career as a character rigger at Liquid Development, and discovered his love for making things easier for the people through scripting and process optimization. From there he was hired at Pipeworks Software as a full time Technical Artist focusing on Rigging and Tool Creation. After about 5 years there working on a wide range of projects, Adam moved to San Francisco to work at Kixeye and began his journey into Tools Creation along with becoming a Lead Technical Artist with a team of 5 other technical artists, focusing on optimizing workflows in engine and out of engine in all aspects. Currently Adam is at Double Fine Productions as a full time Character Rigger for Psychonauts 2, and has also been managing the character animation pipeline.

Adam is very enthusiastic about educating the next generation of animators/gamers. Besides creating amazing game rigs at Double Fine, Adam is also the brains behind the website gamesmaderight.com, a resourceful site for gamers.

mark acero

Principal Combat Designer, People Can Fly Studio

Mark Acero has 21 years of Game Development experience working for some of the largest names in the game industry such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft. He's developed both movie based games such as Star Wars Episode 3, Iron Man and the Incredibles and original IPs such as Watch Dogs which broke industry records for most games sold at the time of its release. Recently as Lead Game Designer at Penumbra, he’s developed a Music Rhythm VR “game” that provides therapy for stroke or TBI patients.  

Currently at People Can Fly, Mark is a Principal Combat Designer helping to create an original IP action adventure game.

sonny santa maria

Animation Supervisor, Crystal Dynamics

Veteran animator Sonny Santa Maria has been making his marks in the Video Game Industry for the past two decades. His career spans through various well known game studios and he has a lot of amazing game credits under his belt. Some of the studios Sonny has worked for are Sony, SEGA, Nintendo, WB and Ubisoft to name a few. Some highlights of his long career are titles such as God of War, Metroid Prime and Evolve. Today he is working at Crystal Dynamics on the Avengers.  

Sonny actively speaks at conferences, and has conducted Animation Workshops in various Asian countries, including -  a week-long workshop on game animation featuring combat and gameplay at Tancent in Shenzen China, and week-long workshops at Studios Secret 6 and MoAnima in Manila, Philippines. He has also done talks at De la Salle University on his experience as a game animator.