An AMPAS VFX Branch member, Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr. has a long career spanning art and animation. His film credits include The Matrix Trilogy, Happy Feet, Sucker Punch, Tree of Life, and The Thing, for which he directed pivotal character animation sequences, among many other features (IMDB). He is also known for his gum wrapper sculptures and stop-motion animations depicting contemporary and historic figures and events. His portrait films and Animated Sportraits are produced entirely on iPhones. Barrois has also worked extensively across VR, AR, and VP, and more recently in AI, as one of a small circle of artists working with OpenAI’s Sora prior to its general release.

Within the art world, Barrois’s work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Fútbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits by Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr., which coincided with the FIFA World Cup’s arrival in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured his first life-sized gum wrapper Sportraits and was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning. Barrois has exhibited at institutions including Pérez Art Museum Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, the Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work has been acquired by and added to the permanent collections of LACMA, the SR Foundation in Seoul, the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museums worldwide. His subjects range from gender inclusion and achievement in the FIFA World Cup and Olympics to America’s COVID-19 crisis, historic racial uprisings and achievements, and contemporary political and social issues.

A New Orleans native and HBCU graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana, Barrois has served on the boards of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, his MFA alma mater, and YA/YA (Young Aspirations/Young Artists), Inc. He has also served on the Academy Museum’s Inclusion Advisory Committee and the Smithsonian’s Regents Advancement Committee and is an advisory board member of the Black Trustees Alliance, fostering programs and supporting exhibitions. In 2024, he received the Black Hollywood Education & Resource Center Award of Achievement.