Executive Management:

Dan Shefelman

Founder & Creative Director.

Dan has served as director, designer and story artist for such studios as Jumbo Pictures, MTV, Blue Sky Studios and Adult Swim. As a professor at FIT School of Art & Design, Shefelman founded the Visual Story for Evolving Media program and leads innovation in emerging creative technology. In 2019 as creative director of The Animation Project (TAP) -- a NYC youth workforce development program -- Shefelman directed a team of TAP trainees on several projects. Among them a 300 foot mural and augmented reality experience in East Harlem and the animated short film Frog Legs. His editorial cartoons have appeared across media platforms including CNN, Newsday and The New York Times.

Dan's Work

Andy Arkin

Business Development Director

Andy Arkin is the founder of BlahBlah Blah, a New York City media and advertising firm that creates animations and special effects for some of the leading studios in the world. Andy has attracted clients like Aardman Studios (creator of Shaun the Sheep), Mike Judge (creator of Beavis and Butthead) and J.J. Sedelmaier (creator of The Ambiguously Gay Duo series that appeared on Saturday Night Live), helping bring to life some of animations’ most memorable characters.

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Advisory Board:

One of the keys to the success of Mud Pie Labs is our board of distinguished creative professionals. Each member shares unique insight based upon their own challenges and accomplishments in the creative industries.

Chris Wedge

Film director and founder of Blue Sky Studios.
Chris has directed a bunch of commercials, shorts and features including Ice Age, Robots and Epic. Chris also worked at Magi on TRON back in the day then teamed up with several fellow crew members and others to start Blue Sky where they pioneered technical advances in CG animation long before it became mainstream and one could make a movie on a laptop. Oscar winner. Sailor.

Kimson Albert

Supervising Animation/Timing Director at Cartoon Networks and member of CN diversity committee.
Kimson has a long list of credits in animation going back to Beavis and Butt-Head at MTV Animation. Since then, he's worked as an animator and director at Comedy Central, Titmouse on shows including Steven Universe, OK KO, Adventure Time, and Venture Brothers. Music aficionado.

Eva McCloskey

Managing Director, Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts.
Previously, Eva was Chief Curator at co:collective a strategy and innovation agency, founder of Agent Gold -- C-suite and creative executive recruitment agency and Executive Director at the pioneering digital agency Barbarian Group. Former roller derby star who is featured in the upcoming documentary Queens of Pain.

Thomas Daly

Principal Product Manager at Samsung NEXT
Passionate ux/ixd/product guy, musician, sailor & sentient being. Previously head of Product for BOXEE TV (Cloud DVR), and now Sr. Product Manager at Samsung working on the future of TV. Live in an old river town up the Hudson from NYC with my wife and four kids, work in NYC and travel often to Tel Aviv and Korea.

Mentors

On each project, we hire gaming and animation experts to work on our projects as freelancers while mentoring our crew. With decades of experience at studios including Blue Sky, Dreamworks and Pixar, our amazing mentors are committed to passing along their technical knowledge, creativity and professionalism to the next generation of young creators.

Daniel Lima

Senior Technical Artist at Undead Labs. Previously Daniel was Senior Character TD at Blue Sky Studios. His career started as a CG generalist in 2001, and has worked in many areas of character creation, such as modeling, animation, rigging, VR and software development. Daniel was the lead developer of the ChopRig System created in 2017 at Blue Sky Studios.

Matt Munn

Animator at Blue Sky Studios. Previously animator at Sony Pictures Animation and Dreamworks Animation. Matt received his animation education at Savannah College of Art and Design. After college he worked at Fathom Studios, freelanced for ReelFX & Hornet studios in NYC.

Patrick Worlock

Head of Production at Moody Studios.
Patrick is an accomplished Production Executive with a deep understanding of story structure, character development and visual story telling. He has previously worked in production at House of Cool, Scholastic, Blue Sky Studios and MTV Animation.

Daniel Shimmyo

Game Developer and owner of DKS Interactive --developing VR experiences, and 3D modeling. Daniel has 15 years CGI experience in feature animation modeling, writing procedural shaders, grooming fur and writing tools and plug-ins to support daily workflows. Previously he was Senior Fur Technical Director at Blue Sky Studios and instructor at The Animation Project and FIT.

Executive Management:

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Dan Shefelman

Andy Arkin

Advisory Board:

Mentors