Born in USSR, Minsk (today's Belarus).
Hold Diploma in Architecture.
Was employed as Director, Camera Man Assistant, Sculptor, Prom maker, Animator, Clean-up Artist, In-betweener at Animation Department within State Movie Studio BelarusFilm.
Moved to USA in 1990 and worked at Will Vinton's Studio Claymation in Portland, Studio Colossal and Danger Producitions in San Francisco as Stop Motion Animator and Sculptor.
Pixar, Tippett, ILM, PDI as 3D Character Animator.
Currently teach at the Academy of Art University.
At the Academy I currently teach ANM 221 _01 and Anim Workshop (Thursdays at 8:30am, room 352).My main approach to teaching is to show how to keep timeline clean and keep amount of work to minimum with maximum results.I'm really drawn to simplicity and common sense of Richard Williams' "Animator's Survival Kit" and I extensively use it in class.However, the book is dedicated to 2D cell animated medium and, when using it to teach 3D Animation students, adjustment is often needed. Ease-in and out, so painstakingly done in 2D, is done by itself in Maya, but joint breaking, squash and stretch, so easily performed in 2D, can be cumbersome in 3D. For this reason I often do exercises from the book myself and have a folder called "RW_3D" (Richard Williams 3D).Like this one:
