Disney and Pixar: Three Women Honored with SciTech Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be honoring 55 individuals across seventeen scientific and technical developments with Scientific and Technical Awards.
The award winners include three women, a number that signifies the most women of a single season. The Disney and Pixar creators will win awards based on their advancement in hair simulation and sound tech.
The importance of such an event should not go unnoticed by the public, as the male domination of this specific area is well documented. Since 1961, only 20 women have received scientific and technical awards. The undeniable victory it is to have three women joining that list cannot go unstated.
The award winners include Hayley Iben. Iben is a simulation research engineer at Pixar and is honored as a piece of the Taz Hair simulation tech team. The second award winner is Kelly Ward Hammel, who is a senior software engineer at Walt Disney Animations.
The last winner is Maryann Simmons, whose work as a software engineer and technical lead on hair and clothes at Disney will receive the award alongside Hammel, among the Walt Disney Animation hair simulation system team.
The SciTech presentation, taking place February 13th on the Oscars website, last took place in 2019. Being pushed back from February to June in accordance with the Oscars revised awards season schedule; the delay, however, proved costly to the awards, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the event to be canceled.
The awards themselves are given to those who take the biggest part in the development of the process of making movies. The hair simulation team that these three women are a part of, was first utilized to bring to life the luscious red curls of Disney Princess, Merida; seen in the Pixar film, Brave.
The process and technology were then used in subsequent films; notably, for Rapunzel’s legendarily long locks in the film, Tangled.
The award show will be hosted by filmmaker Nia DaCosta and should have a fairly large following to take in this historic moment.