Pioneers

The Pioneers were formed in the late 1980s through the efforts of BJ and Ken Anderson, Bert Herzog, Dave Weisberg, and Carl Machover. The annual Pioneers Reception was first included in the 1988 conference program as a ‘Birds of a Feather’ session. Later Pioneer Chairs include John Dill, Dave Kasik, Jon Peddie, Mike Macedonia, Ingrid Carlbom, and Frank Foster. The current Chair since 2019 is Ed Kramer, who holds monthly Zoom meetings with more than 20 volunteer steering committee members.

The criteria to become a Pioneer remains the same as it was when the group was formed – more than 20 years of professional work experience, and a small monetary contribution

to support the annual Pioneers Reception and other projects. Currently that sum is $20, which is added to the $50 annual ACM/SIGGRAPH membership fee to form an ACM/SIGGRAPH Pioneers Membership level.

While the criteria are simple enough, it’s what lies below the surface that distinguishes this group from the thousands who attend SIGGRAPH each year, and from the hundreds of thousands who work in the graphics industry. Many of these folks are truly computer graphics

pioneers. Through their trailblazing work, they have revolutionized the entire spectrum of computer graphics technology and professional applications.  People like Kurt Akeley, Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull, Matthew Conti, Donna Cox, Susan Crouse, Paul Debevec, Don Greenberg, Pat Hanrahan, Jim Foley, Andy van Dam, Mary Whitton, Nick England, Jeff Jortner, Dave Kasik, Jon Peddie – and well over 600 more – continue to discover, develop, and mature the industry.

The Pioneers Reception is always fun and informal, with plenty of food and drink and a plethora of interesting, engaging, and challenging conversations. While many would point to the Pioneers themselves as the highlight, the main event of the show each year is the prestigious Pioneers Featured Speaker presentation. Since 2024, hearing the Pioneers Featured Speaker has been an option open to the entire conference, giving attendees the rare opportunity to experience a retrospective from someone who has had a profound influence on the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques – complete with behind-the-scenes video of their early pioneering work.  Past speakers include CG artist David Em, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, the Jet Propulsion Lab’s Jim Blinn, CG film pioneer Jeff Kleiser, the late VFX luminary Douglas Trumbull, scientific visualization pioneer Donna Cox, recursive ray-tracing for global Illumination originator Turner Whitted, foundational textbook authors Jim Foley and Andy van Dam, future technologist and Perlin noise creator Ken Perlin, and earliest user-programmable graphics and image processor developers Nick England and Mary Whitton. In 2025, Ed Catmull gave his presentation Catmull Story: To SIGGRAPH and Beyond to a packed auditorium in Vancouver, which was followed by a 30^th anniversary screening of a remastered TOY STORY for conference attendees.

Being a Pioneer also offers access to numerous year-round events. There are always between-conference Zooms for the Pioneers to get together virtually. There are curated year-round online panel discussions with experts on selected topics. So far we have presented panels on: Analog Animation, Graphics Processors, Computer Graphics Education, Computer Art and Animation, Computer Graphics in Aerospace (two panels), Generative AI (also two panels), and Computer Graphics for Medical Applications. Currently we are planning the Pioneers of Computer-Aided Design, for May of 2026.

The Pioneers also conduct interviews with important voices in the history of our industry, including many former SIGGRAPH Conference Chairs recalling specifics of their year’s conference. We help compile historical computer graphics artifacts, both digital and physical, in cooperation with the SIGGRAPH archive (linked below.)  We create an In Memoriam video each year, and have addressed specialized topics like how to archive one’s personal legacy of documents and artifacts. For the 50^th anniversary conference in 2023, the Pioneers created a four-hour reel consisting entirely of submissions of the membership’s early videos!

All of the Pioneers video content mentioned above is available for anyone to watch on the SIGGRAPH YouTube channel, and is nicely organized on the SIGGRAPH History site at https://history.siggraph.org/community-pioneers/

Anyone interested in becoming a SIGGRAPH Pioneer and who meets the criteria detailed above can apply here – just scroll down until you find the JOIN button:

– Originally written in 2024 by Jon Peddie, updated in 2026 by Dave Kasik and Ed Kramer