Judith grew up in rural England only to be displaced to New Jersey for a couple of years in her teens. Having overcome her fear of change, life became a lot more interesting. With a degree in Art & Design in Social Contexts and Contemporary Cultural Studies Judith found herself lacking a vocation and poorly equipped to enter the workforce. So began a period of social activism working in the voluntary sector as a photographer, teacher, curator and obsessive writer of grant applications.
In 1987, frustrated by the luddite tendencies of her fellow lefties, Judith joined Middlesex Polytechnic’s new MA, Computing in Design program to learn for herself what could be achieved if artists gained the skills to develop their own tools. So began a love of the process of solving problems, awareness of how important it is to define useful relationships between things and actions, and that a good structure allows for complex growth.
In one way or another Judith has spent the last 25+ years, most of them in Los Angeles, applying technology to the process of creating things. This has included over fifteen years of experience in digital production, many of them supervising digital effects at facilities including Digital Domain and Disney’s The Secret Lab where she worked on ground-breaking effects projects for films including “Fight Club”, “Titanic” and “Apollo 13”. She also lead the computer graphics team for the SIGGRAPH ’98 Interactive Dance Club, a seminal event in which music, visual arts and lighting were all created in real-time by input from dancers.
Currently she leads a team at Side Effects Software in the effort to bring Houdini’s procedural content creation tools, long depended on by film visual effects artists, to the wider game development community so that they can build vast and richly detailed worlds that beg to be explored.