Joe Letteri

Short Biography

Joe Letteri ONZM (born 1957) is a senior visual effects artist, winner of four Academy awards, four BAFTA awards and four VES awards. He is the current Director of the Academy Award-winning Weta Digital, having joined the company in 2001. He has received several awards and nominations as visual effects supervisor, the latest (as of January 2015) being Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. He attended Center High School (Pennsylvania) in 1975 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He gave the keynote address at UC Berkeley's December Convocation on December 19, 2010.Joe Letteri Visual Effects - Weta DigitalJoe Letteri’s pioneering work in visual effects has earned him four Oscars for Best Visual Effects – for Avatar, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and King Kong. He has a longstanding interest in creating compelling, realistic creatures – from Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, to Gollum, the Na’vi in Avatar, and Caesar from The Planet of the Apes.He developed many techniques that have become industry standards for creating photorealistic digital effects. This includes co-developing the subsurface scattering technique that brought Gollum to life – which won him an Academy Technical Achievement Award – and pushing the development of large-scale virtual production.