Craig Barron

Craig Barron is an Academy-Award winning visual effects supervisor, entrepreneur, lecturer and film historian. For more than two decades, Barron has been innovating techniques to create cinematic illusions, contributing to the visual effects on more than one hundred films. Barron has served nine years as a member of the Academy Board of Governors, representing the visual effects branch and is a founding member of the Visual Effects Society. As of 2014, he is co-chair of the AMPAS Science & Technology Council. Barron's career began with the "Star Wars" visual-effects revolution when he joined Industrial Light + Magic in 1979 at age 18 (then the youngest person at ILM), and plunged into matte-effects photography for "The Empire Strikes Back." He worked on such landmark productions as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial." He was supervisor of photography of ILM's matte department from 1984 to 1988. In honor of his cinematographic work, he was named associate member o