Cassidy Curtis is an animator, graphics researcher, look developer, and artist. He was a character animator for two decades at PDI/DreamWorks, where he supervised animation on Toothless in “How to Train Your Dragon” and Alex the Lion in the “Madagascar” movies, and helped guide the development of the Academy Award-winning animation software, PREMO. His early contributions to non-photorealistic rendering research include “Computer-Generated Watercolor” and “Loose and Sketchy Animation”, as well as animated shorts “Brick-a-Brac” and “Fishing”. He fell in love with real-time graphics as a technical art lead at Google Spotlight Stories, where he developed stylized rendering techniques for animated VR films like “Pearl” and “Age of Sail”. He has received two VES Awards, has contributed to films that have won Annies, Emmys, and an Oscar, and in 2018 was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. More recently, at Google Research, he took his first foray into machine learning with the paper “Toward Believable Acting for Autonomous Animated Characters”. He currently works at Google DeepMind, where he continues to do research at the intersection of animation and AI, while pursuing his love for artistic rendering through both research and personal art projects.