STATEMENT

I am delighted to have been asked by Carlye Archibeque to run for Secretary of the Los Angeles SIGGRAPH chapter.  My primary goals in this position are to use my endless energy and social connections to help increase our membership and assist in event planning to include members of the animation and visual effects community that the LA SIGGRAPH chapter hasn’t yet reached.

As the Director of Development at New Deal Studios, I have the pleasure of meeting and working with a constant flow of creative people in the film, visual effects, and animation industries. It would be an honor to represent the Los Angeles SIGGRAPH chapter to any and all that I come in contact with.

BIOGRAPHY

Brooke Keesling is an award-winning filmmaker, animator, educator and overall lover of life. She has worked in visual effects for nearly a decade and is currently the Director of Development at New Deal Studios, a full-service visual effects commercial and film production studio, best known for their work on feature films such as The Dark Knight, The Aviator, Iron Man, I Am Legend, The Departed, Watchmen, Alice in Wonderland, and Shutter Island.

Raised by an eccentric former psychedelic light-show artist who owns the oldest model train store in Los Angeles, Brooke has always had her hands in model making, art and film production. Her college education began at UC Santa Cruz where she studied the meticulous art of natural scientific illustration. Brooke's highly detailed drawings and paintings have been featured in galleries as well as the Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, California.

In 2001 Brooke earned her MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts, studying experimental, traditional and stop-motion animation under mentors Jules Engel, E. Michael Mitchell, Stephen Hillenburg and Mark Osborne. While at CalArts, Keesling completed a few animated short films including the not-quite cult-classic Meatclown, and the award winning Boobie Girl which have played in numerous film festivals worldwide including the MoMA and Anthology Film Center in New York, The Cannes Film Festival, Sundance, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The HBO Comedy Festival, The Hiroshima Animation Festival, The Ottawa International Animation Festival among many others. Boobie Girl also garnered many awards along the way including the student Emmy Award and Academy Award.

Keesling has dedicated much of her life to educating young, creative people. For nine years, she taught animation and life drawing to inner city youth at community centers such as the Watts Towers Art Center, as well as a variety of schools all over Los Angeles, through the CalArts Community Arts Partnership.  Her passion for teaching led her to a position as Associate Professor of Animation and Digital Media at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.  In 2009- after three long Detroit winters- Keesling returned to her native, sunny Los Angeles to work back in film production and visual effects at the amazing New Deal Studios.

Endlessly energetic and obscenely social, Keesling is an active member of ASIFA, the Visual Effects Society, and a long-standing member of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee, dedicated to preserving mid-century modern architecture. She is also an animation programmer for the Ann Arbor Film Festival and a film programmer for LUNAFEST, a non-profit film festival whose proceeds go to the Breast Cancer Fund.

Brooke especially enjoys meeting and connecting creative people in every realm and it's her personal goal to meet every amazing, creative person on the planet; Brooke realizes that this is impossible, but she is extremely happy to die trying.