Floyd Norman is an animator, storyboard, layout, and concept artist. He was born in in 1935 and grew up in Santa Barbara California. He came to have a career in animation nearly 60 years ago when he started as the first African American to work for Walt Disney. While there he worked on films like The Jungle Book, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, One Hundred and One Dalmations, and many more. He would later go on to work for Hannah Barbara, Ruby-Spears, Film-Roman (a Latinx owned studio), and Pixar. Most recently he worked on Monsters University, Mulan, The Hunchback of Norte Dame, and Toy Story 2. He has been recognized through many awards, invited to lecture and speak at countless schools. He has also published a book called "Animated Life", and is the focus of a new documentary about his life. I found out about Floyd through the African Americans in Animation past & present facebook page.
I am writing a piece for Rethinking Schools and was going to mention the Birthday tacos book you illustrated in my list of books that represent values and traditions in the unit I've develop for 2nd grade and I stumbled upon this!
ReplyDeleteThese are beautiful Robert! We should find a way to put them up at MLA with some bilingual blurbs for the kids....see I'm all the way in New Zealand and still being inspired by you. Hope you, Saj and the family are well!
I love Rethinking Schools!! Congrats to you for getting an article! And thanks for the mention, Arte Publico will be happy. Thanks so much for the love, i'm glad they connected with you. Im going to attempt to do one for each day of the month so I would definitely be down to put them up!
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