Animation Panel Event

Kamora Jones is a Las Vegas-based multimedia artist who works in analog and digital mediums. Though Kamora started drawing and painting at age three, she has had many art instructors and creative guides. Additionally, she was one of the early graduates of the Las Vegas Academy Visual Arts program. For 17 years, Kamora has been working For Bally Technologies/Scientific Games/Light & Wonder and is currently a Manager of Game Art. Additionally, since 2017, Kamora has been creating art for her Transmigration Series, which explores popular and obscure metaphysical concepts through an ongoing series of drawings, paintings, and writings @artsoldier77.

Jo Meuris is an award-winning Dutch-Canadian/Chinese-West Indian filmmaker from Canada. She holds an MFA in Film, Television, and Digital Media from University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA in Animation from Concordia University. An animator by trade, her work can be seen in well over a dozen National Film Board of Canada productions, where she worked for fifteen years as an animator, supervising animator, and lead compositor, and where she also directed two films of her own. In 2014, Jo moved to the United States and spent nine years building the new animation program at Nevada State College in Las Vegas where she taught animation, editing, and drawing, before finally landing in Los Angeles where she currently lives and works, teaching animation at Loyola Marymount University. Her most recent film, Aurora, was completed in 2020 and is independently produced. The film has screened at scores of festivals, is being distributed by the Animation Show of Shows, and was presented at San Diego Comic-Con International to an audience of 4500 in 2022. Jo continues to develop new animated projects and in her spare time, enjoys windy days at the beach, going adventuring, and fighting dragons for fun…

James Parris is a multi-hyphenate writer/director/animator/illustrator, straddling the disciplines of film, TV, live-action, and animation, and a self-proclaimed member of ‘The Club of Getting It Done.” A graduate of New York City’s High School of Art and Design and Pratt Institute, his feature credits include The Lion King, Spider-Man, X2: X-men United, The Mummy 3, I Robot, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. TV series credits include Deadwood, Wally Kazam, Shimmer and Shine, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and Doug Unplugs. Commercial clients include Toyota, Lego, SoBe, Playstation, Nintendo, and DirecTV.

Jinghan Zhang is an independent animation artist, director and producer. Born in Northeast of China, the city of Harbin, at the age of 13 Zhang moved to Beijing with her family. Upon graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, in 2015 Zhang moved to the United States to continue her journey as a filmmaker. Being influenced by radically different cultures within China, in her work Zhang explores the depths of human nature with its higher desires for love and kindness as well as its downfalls prompted by greed, last, and betrayal. Experimenting with different visual styles, Zhang explores a visually rich world. Zhang’s films have been warmly received by the indie animation community around the world. In 2019 Zhang’s short film “Elixir” became the finalist at the USA Film Festival, received the Best Animation at the Vegas Movie Awards, the Best Animated Short at the Spotlight Short Film Award, the Best Animation at the Rome Independent Prisma Awards and was also selected at the Animation Day in Cannes. Collaborating with United Nations Organization for Poverty Alleviation and Development (OPAD), Jinghan created an animated opening for a United Nations Sustainable Development Goals video. Currently Zhang collaborates with Lumen Animae Studios in Los Angeles on diverse animation projects.