On this episode of 8111, Maggie Oh. Maggie was an only child and grew up in Chicago. She was always interested in animation from an early age, thanks in part to Batman: The Animated Series. She attended MIT and studied computer science and electrical engineering as an undergrad. But she also took illustration, drawing and painting courses at MassArt.
Maggie went to SIGGRAPH for the first time though a co-op project for the MIT Media Lab. After school she worked as an interactive programmer at a web company in Boston. She then decided to enroll at art school to earn an MFA. But she landed a Summer internship at Pixar and decided to drop out of art school to continue to work in industry and study independently online and though professional work.
In October 2003 Maggie landed a job at ILM. She started in render support working in the trailer and had an interesting run in with a family of raccoons working the graveyard shift. She later worked as a technical director on films including; Star Wars: Episode III, Evan Almighty, Chicken Little 3D, Lions for Lambs, Lemony Snicket, Pirates of the Caribbean, and many others. She also worked developing the HDR pipeline.
In 2008 Maggie left to work at the California Academy of Sciences to work on their first planetarium show. She then moved over to doing freelancing for various visual effects companies including Polygon, Cafe FX, Spy Post, and then Image Movers Digital.
Then Maggie went to 343 Industries to work on Halo 4 & 5 followed by time at Microsoft helping develop the HoloLens. From there she spent a year at NVIDIA and then returned to ILM for a few years working with the ILMxLAB. Today Maggie is working at Google alongside Dan Goldman on Project Starline.
Maggie is brilliant. Her career journey is a who’s who of high-end technology. Her love of working in the space where art meets engineering has guided her choices. It was great fun to chat and hear about her story.
