Internationally renowned, award-winning designer, director, animator and educator Edward Bakst has joined The College for Creative Studies (CCS) as Chairman of the Department of Animation and Digital Media.
CCS President Richard L. Rogers made the announcement, saying that Bakst will bring an international feel, as well as animation experience and knowledge to the program.
Bakst intends to draw upon his reputation and global contacts to create a program that attracts visiting animation scholars, artists, festival organizers and faculty from around the world. He says, “Such varied faculty and visitors represent and project to students a spectrum of global ideas, creative attitudes, styles and animation techniques that are unattainable in most of animation programs around the States and the world."
A similar program was engineered by Bakst at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver, where he served as the founding chair of the International Animation Department. He was also the founding president of ASIFA-Colorado and has taught at the Pratt Institute and New York’s Columbia University, from which he received his Master of Fine Arts in Film Directing.
As an independent Designer/Director living in New York, Bakst produced projects for such clients as Nickelodeon, MTV, Viacom, Noggin, NBC, ABC, the SCI-FI Channel, the Smithsonian Institution, PBS, Viasa Airlines, Ajinomoto, Children’s Television Workshop and the FX/M Fox Network. He also has done object and clay animation for MTV, BIC Corp., Sesame Workshop, Polygram Records, HBO, UNICEF and more.
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship has many international awards under his belt, including gold medals at the ASIFA Animation Festival, Monaco’s Imagina Festival, Worldfest, British Online, the New York Festival and Houston International Festival. His work has also been selected and presented, on three occasions, at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre.
Located in Detroit’s Cultural Center, CCS is a private, fully accredited, four-year college offering Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in animation and digital media, communication design, crafts, fine arts, illustration, industrial design, interior design, and photography.
