Karen Disher

Karen Disher
Born Karen Beth Disher[1]
August 7, 1972
Alma mater Tisch School of the Arts[2]
Occupation Storyboard artist, film director
Years active 1993-present
Spouse(s) Robert Partington (m. 2001-present)

Karen Beth Disher (born August 7, 1972) is an American storyboard artist and film director. She has played in many voice over roles in cartoons, TV, movies, video games. She is an artist at Blue Sky Studios, an in-house studio at 20th Century Fox Animation.

Disher graduated from Tisch School of the Arts.[2] After graduation she joined MTV, where she designed the main characters and was the supervising director on an animated television series Daria.[1] Meanwhile, she directed two TV feature-length instalments in the series, Is It Fall Yet? in 2000 and the follow-up Is It College Yet? in 2002. She then joined Blue Sky Studios, where she worked as story artist on many animated films, including Robots, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Horton Hears a Who!, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,[3] Ice Age: Continental Drift, and Epic. She was also the head of story on Rio,[3] and directed a short animated film Surviving Sid[3] and a television special Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas, both part of the Ice Age franchise. In addition to story boarding and directing, she lent her voice to some minor characters in the films she worked on, most notably to Scratte in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.[4]

Personal life

In 2001, Disher married Robert Todd Partington, then a supervisor of computer graphics and animation technologies for MTV Networks.[1]

Filmography

Year Title Role Notes
1996 Beavis and Butt-head Do America key pose artist
1999 Life animator
2000 Is It Fall Yet? director/original character development/supervising director
2002 Is It College Yet? director/original character development/animation director
2005 Robots storyboard artist
2006 Ice Age: The Meltdown story artist
2008 Horton Hears a Who! Who Kid story artist
2009 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Scratte storyboard artist
2011 Rio Mother Bird head of story
2012 Ice Age: Continental Drift storyboard artist
2013 Epic storyboard artist
2014 Rio 2 storyboard artist

Television

Year Title Role Notes
1994–1997 Beavis and Butt-head layout artist
1997–2002 Daria Sally supervising director/original character designer
2008 Surviving Sid S'more director
2011 Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas Molehog director

Video games

Year Title Notes
2000 Daria's Inferno creative consultant

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 "WEDDINGS; Karen Disher, Robert Partington". The New York Times. May 13, 2001. Retrieved October 29, 2013.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Tisch Special Programs (January 21, 2011). "Master Class with Karen Disher". YouTube. Retrieved October 29, 2013.
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Karen Disher in Tisch Asia: Metamorphosis of a Film". Tisch Asia Blog. November 26, 2010. Retrieved October 29, 2013.
  4. "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - Production Notes" (PDF). Visual Hollywood. Retrieved October 29, 2013. Karen Disher, who heads the film’s story department, voices Scratte. But Disher’s responsibilities extended beyond her vocal work. Unlike the film’s main story, scripted by Michael Berg & Peter Ackerman and Mike Reiss and Yoni Brenner, from a story by Jason Carter Eaton, the story department, working closely with Saldanha, created the Scrat-Scratte scenes. Disher and her team embraced the task of inventing new challenges for the beloved Scrat. “Working on the Scrat-Scratte scenes is the purest form of animation,” she notes.

External links