2018 Schedule
Friday, October 19
Saturday, October 20
Sunday, October 21
2018 Partners & Sponsors
Founding Partners
Presenting Sponsors
Major Sponsors
Industry Partners
Media Sponsors
Community Partners
Hospitality Sponsors
2018 Jury
Allison Abbate
Allison Abbate is an executive vice president at Warner Animation Group. Prior to assuming her post at WAG, Abbate was an executive producer on the global blockbuster The LEGO® Movie, and a producer on Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Brad Bird’s Iron Giant.
Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant is a five-time NBA Champion, two-time Olympic Gold Medalist, NBA MVP, two-time NBA Finals MVP, 15-time All-NBA player, 18-time NBA All-Star and the NBA’s 3rd all-time leading scorer. In his new role as producer, storyteller and writer, Bryant created Granity Studios, a multi-media content creation company focused on helping athletes learn the process […]
Melissa Cobb
Melissa Cobb is Vice President, Kids and Family at Netflix, the world’s leading internet entertainment service. Cobb leads the content team responsible for bringing kids and family titles, both live-action and animated, to Netflix members in 190 countries around the world. Prior to Netflix, Cobb was Chief Creative Officer for Oriental DreamWorks, where she oversaw […]
Dean DeBlois
Golden Globe® winner and two-time Academy Award® nominee Dean DeBlois is best known for writing, directing, and executive producing 2010’s How To Train Your Dragon and its 2014 sequel. He is currently reprising those roles on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019), the final installment of the trilogy and culmination of one […]
Peter Debruge
Peter Debruge is Variety’s Chief International Film Critic. He first joined the Variety team in 2005 as a features editor, compiling the magazine’s annual 10 Actors, Directors and Screenwriters to Watch lists as well as overseeing a range of special editorial sections, including those tied to the magazine’s philanthropy-driven Power of Youth and Power of Comedy events.
Carolyn Giardina
Carolyn Giardina is Tech Editor at The Hollywood Reporter and writes its Behind the Screen blog. In 2015, Carolyn was presented American Cinema Editors’ Robert Wise Award, which recognizes a journalist for contributions to film editing. She was the 2011 recipient of the International Cinematographers Guild’s Technicolor William A. Fraker Award for journalistic contributions to cinematography.
Jorge R. Gutiérrez
Jorge R. Gutiérrez is a painter, writer and director born in Mexico City and raised in Tijuana. Gutierrez has completed various films, cartoons, and paintings exploring his love of Mexican pop and folk culture.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson
Jennifer Yuh Nelson made her feature film directorial debut with Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), which earned more than $665 million at the worldwide box-office. She continued on to direct the franchise’s successful follow-up Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016). Nelson has lent her talents to a variety of DreamWorks Animation pictures, including as head of […]
Henry Selick
Henry Selick is best known as the writer/director of the Oscar-nominated stop-motion animated feature Coraline, as well as the director of James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas. While he has made films using hand-drawn, cut-out and C.G. animation and live-action, his favorite medium is stop-motion where he has collaborated with some […]
Charles Solomon
An internationally respected critic and historian of animation, Charles Solomon has written on the subject for the New York Times, Newsweek (Japan), Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, Variety, the Manchester Guardian, and National Public Radio.
Mabel Tam
Mabel Tam is VP/Head Film Buyer of LANDMARK THEATRES. Landmark Theatres is the nation’s largest theatre chain dedicated to exhibiting and marketing independent film. A 16 year veteran of the entertainment industry, she is a graduate of UCLA and resides in LA with her family.
Anne Thompson
Born and raised in New York, IndieWire Editor at Large Anne Thompson has been a contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, The Observer, and Wired. She has served as film columnist at Variety and deputy editor of Variety.com. Anne was the Deputy Film Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, the West Coast Editor of Premiere, a Senior Writer at Entertainment Weekly, and West Coast Editor for Film Comment.