Hello and Howdy
Brooklyn-born · Los Angeles-based · Renaissance Woman
I'm Laura Barbera — Emmy Award winner, Emmy-nominated Supervising Producer, Director, Animator, and the creative and technical connective tissue across all of Marvel Studios Animation.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where I collected degrees the way some people collect stamps — a BFA in Photography, then an MFA in Painting, Drawing & Printmaking, then another MFA in Computer Graphics & Interactive Media, all Magna or Summa Cum Laude. Before any of that I was a trained acrobat, worked at an indie record company, and ran a gallery in NYC. At some point the art world and the animation world collided and I never looked back.
Thirty years of industry experience have taken me from animator on Star Trek: Voyager (Primetime Emmy Award, 2001) to character animation on The Polar Express and I Am Legend, to Previs Animator on Alita: Battle Angel, to Animation Supervisor on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to Supervising Producer at Nickelodeon on WallyKazam!, to Global Head of CG at CoSA VFX across LA, Vancouver, and Atlanta, to where I am now: Director, CG at Marvel Studios, shaping the animation slate from X-Men '97 to Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Along the way I've been Marvel's primary AI evaluator for over two years — embedded in pre-release testing for every major generative AI tool entering the production pipeline, and the studio's official representative to Disney Research in Burbank and Zurich. I'm an elected Executive Board Member of the Visual Effects Society and serve on the ATAS AI Task Force Committee.
Outside Marvel, I run Same Brain Productions with my creative collaborator — the production home for our original work. We currently have over ten projects in development across animation, live action, and comedy, including the puppet comedy show Learn to Paint Good.
On my own I've also built two independent ventures: the Menagerie App, an AI-powered collection manager for lifelong collectors, and Dead Family Business, a shop for objects with stories.
I've also spent nearly two decades teaching — at Otis College of Art and Design, Gnomon School of Visual Effects, and CUNY — because I genuinely believe animation is magical, and the job of everyone above the artists is to protect the conditions where that magic can happen.
"I'd consider myself a true Renaissance Woman — which is just a polite way of saying I have too many interests and not enough hours in the day."
In the 1990s, early in my CG career, I made a glass ibis. Then a monkey. Then a frog. Probably a donkey — it's been thirty years and hard drives are unreliable narrators. Each one rendered in that chrome/glass style that was pushing the limits of what the software could do at the time.
The ibis ended up on the front of my demo reel for years. It sat center stage on my first website — Welcome to the Menagerie — alongside ornate botanical borders and a nav item called "Ramblings." A nod to Tennessee Williams, and the thing that quietly named everything that came after it.
The Menagerie App. Dead Family Business. This site. All of it traces back to one glass bird made in the 90s that refused to stop being relevant.