Meghdad Asadilari is an award-winning animator and Assistant Professor of Motion Picture Science in the School of Film and Animation at Rochester Institute of Technology. His personal films have screened at more than 100 international film festivals, including Oscar-qualifying festivals such as Animafest Zagreb and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and have been exhibited at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He has received two Student Academy Award nominations for his personal films, and served as Animation Director for the Emmy-nominated series Storyline Online from 2021 to 2024. In April 2026, his film Beyond the Spheres (2012) was curator-selected for Labocine's mathēmatiká program, presented by the Simons Foundation, a recognition that reflects the enduring intersection of scientific thinking and creative animation practice at the core of his work.

This intersection is grounded in a distinctive, interdisciplinary educational foundation. Asadilari holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Communications Engineering, followed by an MFA in Computer Animation. That engineering training enriches how he approaches animation problems, adding fluency in system design and computational thinking to his creative practice.

His technical expertise in animation spans rigging and character setup, dynamics and simulation, VFX and compositing, data visualization, real-time pipelines, and motion capture. Alongside this 3D foundation, he brings deep professional experience in 2D puppeting and procedural animation.

With his background spanning engineering, computer animation, and more than fifteen years of professional practice in both 2D and 3D pipelines alongside high-level studios in animation and VFX , his current research is driven by the question of what becomes possible when those distinct disciplines are brought together at the highest level, and validated through the most rigorous venues in the field.

This website documents Asadilari’s scholarship during his tenure period across three areas:

• Creative Scholarship

• Publications

• Presentations