Jonali Bhattacharyya is the Department Lead for Digital Media Arts at San Jose City College, and the Founder & CEO at Bits Bytes & Pixels. She received her MFA in Animation & Visual Effects from Academy of Arts University in San Francisco and BSc in Zoology from Gauhati University, India.
Jonali started her career in the Game Industry in 2006 as an animator and shipped AAA Games including Iron Man, Golden Axe Beast Rider, Lair and Marvel Ultimate Alliance II. She is an award-winning educator, whose multifaceted academic career has spanned more than 15 years of teaching within animation, game design, graphic design and visual storytelling. At San Jose City College Jonali is currently building a new Digital Media Art Department, creating a guided learning platform for a new generation of students.
Hailing from a small town in Northeast India, with no exposure to computer graphics during her early education and few opportunities for higher education in the discipline, Jonali is passionate about teaching the youth of our community. In 2018 she founded her company, Bits Bytes & Pixels, which brings education in computer graphics to middle and high schoolers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and promotes creativity through early engagement with digital art. She is an avid advocate for diversity and education for women—promoting events and activities at the regional and national levels. She also serves as a Mentor and Board Member for Visual Equator, a nonprofit serving underprivileged students in her community.
Jonali started volunteering with SIGGRAPH as a student in 2005; since then, she has served on various SIGGRAPH conference committees including Computer Animation Festival Committee in 2017, Mobile Committee in 2017 and VR, AR & MR Committee in 2018. She has also served as General Submissions Juror in 2017, 2018 and 2020. She currently serves as the Lifelong Learning Committee Chair at ACM SIGGRAPH.
