09/2004-05/2006

School of Visual Arts, New York, NY,

Master of Fine Arts in Computer Art

University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt,

Germany, Diploma in Media System Design

06/2012-Present

Senior Character Technical Director, Blue Sky Studios, Greenwich, CT

01/2012-Present

Lead Character Technical Director, Blue Sky Studios, Greenwich, CT

Creative Lead for face rigs on current production

05/2009-05/2012

Character Technical Director, Blue Sky Studios, Greenwich, CT

Creating expressive, flexible and efficient rigs that allow animators to bring life to the characters and props in films like "Ice Age": Building skeletons, setting up deformations and engineering control systems

09/2006-03/2009

Lead Technical Director, Spans & Partner, Hamburg, Germany

Character rigging, set supervision, development of pipeline tools, special effects, including water, cloth and particles

01/2005-05/2006

Unix / PC Lab Assistent, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

Maintaining the MFA Computer Art network and assisting the staff in all aspects of Computer System Administration, maintaining the MFA Computer Art Intranet website

02/2004-06/2004

3D Internship, ProSiebenSat.1 Production, Berlin, Germany

3D animation and modeling with Lightwave in one of Germany's largest TV production house

08/2002-02/2003

3D Scanning Internship, Gentle Giant Studios, Burbank, CA

3D scanning and preparing of 3D scans for toys and special effects

10/2001-07/2002

Research Assistent, Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV), Darmstadt, Germany

Modeling of low resolution characters for Virtual Reality purposes

07/2001-09/2001

Programming Internship, IBM Hannover, Germany

Development of Java-Applets and Java Server Pages

AnimSchool, USA (July 2011 - Present)

Teaching Character Technical Direction

School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA (2005)

Graduate Seminar in Maya (basic interface, modeling, lighting, rendering)

Bronx Community College (CUNY), Bronx, New York, USA (2005)

Portfolio discussion, Gallery talk

Software: XSI, Maya, Syflex, Realflow, Flash, Photoshop, Shake

Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac

Programming languages: Python, JScript, MEL, PHP, MySQL, HTML, Java, C++

German (native), English (fluent), French (advanced), Italian (basic), Japanese (beginner)

Fulbright Professional Enhancement Grant, 2005

Fulbright Scholarship, 2004

Scholarship of Carl-Duisberg-Gesellschaft, Germany, 2002