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Dozens of Los Angeles-area artists, researchers, and studios take the world stage at the 53rd annual SIGGRAPH conference, from blockbuster visual effects to university research

LOS ANGELES, July 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The 53rd annual SIGGRAPH conference will bring together thousands of innovators, researchers, and industry leaders from around the world at the Los Angeles Convention Center from Sunday, 19 July through Thursday, 23 July 2026 to explore today's innovations, trends, and future predictions of computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the first time since 2023, the conference returns to LA, a frequent host city and a global capital of film, games, and immersive media.

LA will not only serve as the host city for SIGGRAPH 2026 but also take center stage, showcasing its creative and technical talent throughout the conference. With the creative industries accounting for 15.4% of California's total employment when direct, indirect, and induced jobs are counted, local innovators will lead and contribute to sessions, forums, panels, workshops, and more, highlighting Southern California's vital role in shaping the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

"LA always feels like home for SIGGRAPH. It's exciting to be back, where we're able to welcome the broad and vibrant community of artists and technologists in Southern California and beyond," said SIGGRAPH 2026 Conference Chair Chris Redmann. "The SIGGRAPH community in LA really represents a cross-section of the entire community: World-class research institutes, world-class studios, both film and game, and everything in between."

SIGGRAPH 2026 continues its mission to build communities that invent, educate, inspire, and redefine the computer graphics landscape. While the conference draws talent from around the world, LA-based professionals are making a significant impact across nearly every facet of the event. Some of the locally based contributors include top talent from Lightstorm Entertainment, Paramount Animation, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Netflix and its Eyeline Labs, Magnopus, Electronic Arts, and Activision, alongside leading researchers and educators from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Southern California (USC).

Attendees can find these local leaders featured in a variety of roles, including the following sessions and experiences:

• Production Sessions invite attendees behind the scenes of some of the world's most ambitious entertainment projects, offering a rare look at the artistry and innovation behind today's blockbuster films, immersive experiences, and games. LA is well represented:
  • "Wētā FX Presents: Avatar: Fire and Ash" brings the latest chapter of the franchise to the stage with Richard Baneham and Peter Litvack of Lightstorm Entertainment.
  • "Research to Reality: Scaling Generative AI for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere" details how generative AI was scaled for the large-format venue, and will be presented by Rudy Grossman, Kevin Mullican, and Ben Grossmann with Magnopus, and Wyatt Bartel with Sphere Entertainment Co.
     
• Spatial Storytelling expands SIGGRAPH's narrative frontier, exploring how stories are experienced through space, immersion, and interaction.
  • "OUT OF THE ASHES: A Work-In-Progress Spatial Story of the Human Cost of Climate Change" is presented by Nonny de la Peña with Emblematic Group and Rory Mitchell with Mercantile.
  • Live performance in virtual space is explored with "Virtual Theatre: Producing Live Theatre on Virtual Stages" with Stephen Butchko with The Ferryman Collective and "Inside the Show: A Live VR Performance and the Backstage Systems Behind It" from Stephen Butchko, Whitton Frank, and Deirdre V. Lyons with The Ferryman Collective.
     
• The Immersive Pavilion offers a dedicated space for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences, including "Uncanny Alley: A New Day", from Butchko, Frank, and Lyons with The Ferryman Collective.
   
• The Games Summit convenes developers and studios around the art, technology, and craft of games.
  • "Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics" features Pasha Sol with Electronic Arts.
  • "Forging the Glacier at IO Interactive: Fireside Chat with Henrik Schlichter" includes John Canning with Advanced Micro Devices.
  • "Beyond the Dot: New Ways to Reduce Motion Sickness in Gaming" is presented by Ewa Trusz with Activision.
     
• Talks present ideas, techniques, and works in progress from across the field.
  • "Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender - Hybrid Stylization A Contextual Approach to the Painterly Aesthetic" features Jerry Huynh with Paramount Animation and a team from Flying Bark Productions on a rendering workflow that moves final stylization into compositing for painterly, temporally stable strokes. Huynh also joins Paramount Animation colleagues Karyn Buczek Monschein, Patrick Kueking, and Samantha Steyns for "Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender - Strike Force A Hybrid In-House Production Model for a Modern 2D/3D Animated Feature Pipeline", on the in-house team built to run finaling, FX, layout, and compositing across a distributed pipeline.
  • "Dressing the Masses - Managing Character Variations at Scale" and "Assets in Motion (AIM) - Injecting life into a static and linear asset building process" feature Brian Cohen with Sony Pictures Imageworks on managing character variation and asset pipelines at scale.
  • "In Defense of Euler Angles in Game Programming" features USC's Matthew Whiting discussing how to choose rotation representations that produce the right motion for the application.
     
• Panels bring experts together for candid discussion.
  • "The Perpetual Pipeline - 50 Years of Symbiosis in Computer Graphics" features Paul Debevec with Netflix, a longtime figure in LA's graphics research community, on a panel marking 50 years of collaboration between graphics researchers and filmmakers and how AI is now accelerating the research-to-screen pipeline.
  • "The Previs Battleground: Precision Planning vs Creative Freedom" features Karl Herbst with Sony Pictures Animation on a panel examining how previs is evolving across animation, VFX, and games, and the trade-offs between fast, exploratory workflows and high-fidelity planning.
     
• Courses welcome beginners and experts alike to immerse themselves in foundational topics and state-of-the-art methods.
  • "Hands-on Course: NVIDIA: Introduction to Slang: The Next-Generation Shading Language" is led by Chris Hebert with NVIDIA and introduces Slang, an open-source shading language that simplifies cross-platform graphics development while maintaining performance on current GPUs.
  • "Physics Is Easier Than You Think: From Classical to Neural Elastic Simulation" features Jernej Barbič with USC and walks attendees through the foundations of elastic simulation to the current research landscape of neural physics.
  • "Fluid Simulation with the Lattice Boltzmann Method" features Kui Wu with LightSpeed Studios on the Lattice Boltzmann Method as a GPU-friendly alternative to traditional solvers, with applications across industrial simulation, game production, and visual effects.
     
• The Educator's Forum inspires the next generation by engaging a community committed to curriculum, pedagogy, tools, and career development. LA educators feature throughout, including:
  • USC's Peter Brinson and Andreas Kratky on cross-cultural game design in "Bridging Artistic Expression and Game Design through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: An Educational Framework from a Seven-Year Japan–U.S. Program", and Sanjay Madhav and Matthew Whiting on teaching game programming in "No Engine Required: Teaching Game Programming (Mostly) From Scratch".
  • Benjamin Noble with The Third Floor on animation and VFX hiring trends in "Current Hiring Trends in the Animation & VFX Industry", and Xin Xin with Processing Foundation and Alex Avila with the Los Angeles Unified School District on expanding coding access in "Art + Code: Case Study in Expanding Access with p5.js".
  • "'Live from LA!': Facilitating Personal and Political Storytelling through Immersive Youth Theater" features Xin, with collaborators from UC Santa Barbara, on an immersive youth-theater production blending dance, poetry, and projection-mapping, using p5.js tools to support young people's political storytelling through personal narratives.
     
• Technical Papers, the premier venue for the latest advances in computer graphics research, showcase deep local strength, anchored by UCLA. Chenfanfu Jiang with UCLA contributes across multiple papers spanning deformable-body dynamics, knitwear simulation, and material point methods, alongside Kui Wu with LightSpeed Studios and a Netflix and Eyeline Labs cluster on video relighting and compositing that includes Li Ma, Mingming He, Ning Yu, and Paul Debevec.
   
• Technical Workshops invite researchers and practitioners to engage in advanced discussion. Chenfanfu Jiang with UCLA organizes or co-organizes several, including "Generative AI Meets Computer Graphics", "Differentiable Physics for Graphics and AI", "Human–AI Co-Creation in Generative Art: Graphics Methods, Systems, and Applications", and "Graphics4Science 2026: Graphics for Cross-Scale Reliable Scientific Instruments".
   
• Frontiers turns the spotlight on emerging, multi-industry topics. Shahram Ghandeharizadeh with USC leads "Dronevision, Holodecks, and Spatial Computing Using Swarms of Flying Light Specks", while "Graphics In Medicine: From the Dev Floor to the Operating Room 2", organized by Enoch Omale with Illuminant Surgical, brings together speakers from USC, UC Irvine, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
   
• The Art Gallery presents work at the intersection of art and technology, including "Are We Gazing at the Same Moon?" by independent artists Jeyun Cloud and Ziqian Yin.
   
• LA-based experts will also contribute to Posters and the ACM SIGGRAPH 365 Chapters: West Coast Meetup, organized by Joan Collins with the LA Professional ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter and Sunil Rampersad with the Professional and Student Chapters Committee.

Los Angeles' presence at SIGGRAPH 2026 further proves the region's role in shaping the upcoming trends of computer graphics and interactive technology. For the full conference lineup and registration details, please visit s2026.siggraph.org.

About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2026
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world's leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2026, the 53rd annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place live 19–23 July at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

SOURCE SIGGRAPH 2026