Alex Forsythe is the Senior Director of Science and Technology for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with over 20 years of experience in the imaging technology industry. He holds BS and MS degees from Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently persuing his PhD from Simion Fraser University. Alex has played a key role in developing and implementing the ACES color management system and the Spectral Sensitivity Index, earning him and his teams several awards, including a Primetime Engineering Emmy in 2012 and the SMPTE Workflow Systems Medal in 2022. Alex is a member of SMPTE and the United States delegation to ISO TC-36 where he has authored numerous SMPTE standards. Prior to his time at the Academy, Alex worked in the New Business Initiatives division of Intel, and the Eastman Kodak Research and Development Labs.

Darin Grant has over 25 years experience in the industry, holding a variety of senior positions as a technologist including Head of Production Technology at Dreamworks Animation, the Global CTO at Digital Domain and Method Studios, and most recently as Group CTO of Animal Logic / SVP Technology of Netflix Feature Animation.

Eric has been the Autodesk representative on the ASWF Governing Board since March 2020.

Jeremy is the Chief Technologist for incubation projects in the Advanced Compute & Solutions division at HP Inc. Prior to joining HP, he was CTO at Jellyfish Pictures. At Jellyfish, he helped grow the company from an eight-man team to a facility of over 550 people across 15 countries. He oversaw several company expansions to different premises and has built a strong reputation for re-imagining the production pipeline using a hybrid of cloud-based and desktop-based technologies. He has a background in IT security (Canada) and earned a Master of Science in Information Technology from the University of Liverpool (UK).

Kimball Thurston is a senior researcher at Weta Digital Ltd. in New Zealand, focused on rendering and related imaging areas. For more than 20 years, he has provided software for the visual effects and general film industry. In 2012, he and his colleagues were awarded a scientific and engineering award by the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences for image processing software used for film restoration and image reparation.

Paul has over 25 years of senior management experience in technology leadership positions and a deep understanding of the importance of the role of technology in creative storytelling. Paul’s career includes 15 years as CTO at SideFX, where he oversaw the development of industry- standard visual effects and animation software tool Houdini from beta onwards. He then served as CTO of audiovisual technology firm Christie Digital, where he was a key member of the global executive team, providing strategic and technical direction to the company’s 1,500 employees across 18 countries. Most recently, Paul was CEO of the Accelerator Centre, a not-for-profit business accelerator that provides mentorship and support to over 120 high-growth technology start-up companies. Paul holds a BMath in computer science from the University of Waterloo, MASc and PhD degrees in engineering from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management.

Phil Parsonage, as CTO of Foundry, leads the company's technology strategy and development for its portfolio of Media & Entertainment software solutions. An Oxford University graduate, winning the Maurice Lubbock prize in Engineering and Computing Science, he first joined Foundry in 2004 working on the Furnace toolset. As an early employee of the company, he was instrumental in the company's later expansion through his contributions to flagship products such as Nuke, Mari, Katana, and Flix. These collaborations, with industry leaders such as Weta and SPI, have earned Academy Sci-Tech awards, an Engineering Emmy, and HPA Engineering Excellence awards. Phil also contributed to the open source plug-in standard, OFX, and has spent time in academia, publishing papers on 3D reconstruction and code generation for visual effects. He was a founding member of AWSF and a contributor to the VES VFX Platform group, before leaving Foundry in 2019. Subsequently, he worked at Sensat and Hadean in engineering leadership roles outside of animation and visual effects, returning to Foundry as CTO in June 2023 and bringing new, diverse experience to the role.

Rob Bredow is an Academy Award-nominated VFX Supervisor who serves as SVP, Chief Creative Officer of Industrial Light & Magic. Bredow has a particular focus on the creative strategy for the storied visual effects company where he is responsible for the company’s overall creative teams, innovation, and business development. Rob also serves in the role of SVP, Creative Innovation for Lucasfilm. Some of Bredow’s previous projects include Solo: A Star Wars Story, ILMxLAB’s story-based virtual reality experiment Trials on Tatooine, and films dating back to Independence Day.

Doing products at Epic Games, mainly for the Creator Ecosystem (Unreal, Twinmotion, Sketchfab, Quixel, Capturing Reality).