“Our Animated Minds” is a documentary film about animation and how it enables artists of all abilities to express themselves through the magic of motion! Join us as we tell the history of this incredible artform and the process by which we teach it to the next generation of diverse minds today, giving them a voice!

Dani Bowman

Founder and Chief Creative Officer of DaniMation Entertainment LLC.

Director, Narrator, Editor, Compositor, Lead Animator, Lead Cinematographer

Dani Bowman—who is on the autism spectrum founded her company, DaniMation Entertainment, at age 11. Dani has gone on to graduate from Woodbury University with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts (BFA) in Animation in 2018 and a Master’s of Business Administration in Global Strategy and Leadership in 2020–where she earned a scholarship in Civic Engagement and Leadership, earned her Entrepreneurship Award, and took both her junior and senior thesis animated shorts to San Diego Comic-Con. Dani is currently working on getting a Doctrine in Psychology focusing on autism.

She has worked professionally in the animation industry since 14, premiering 9 award-wining animated short films at Comic-Con each year for the past 8 years.  Her shorts feature the voices of Joe Mantegna, Tom Kenny (Sponge Bob), June Foray, Debi Derryberry, and Stella Ritter, among others. Dani uses her passions of Public Speaking, Animation, Illustration, Fine and Visual Arts, and Teaching Animation to demonstrate to others on the autism spectrum that anything is possible.

Since age 15, Dani has led summer animation camps around the country, initially with Joey Travolta’s Inclusion Films, and then expanding out on her own including the University of South Florida and most recently to Plymouth University in England to teach to over 1500 teens and young adults with autism and other different abilities. Dani not only teaches animation, but also works with her students as a role model and mentor, encouraging them to follow their dreams.

Arturo Brito

Student

Animator, Assistant Cinematographer

Arturo Alejandro Brito B. was born in Caracas (Venezuela) on April 7, 2002. When he was a year and a half old he was diagnosed with Autism. He flapped his hands; he walked on tiptoe, hitting his head against the wall. The day we received the diagnosis we decided that each achievement would be considered as an accomplishment and that we would go step at time. When he was in sixth grade, a friend gave him a book on how to draw dinosaurs. From that time on, everything changed. His behavior. His attention and energy. 

Arturo found in the drawing a way to express himself and with a video game he began to make his first animations with Stop Motion. Then, with the Lego blocks, he found a range of possibilities and they were used to make small videos.

In 2015 he moved to the United States, and when he went to High School he applied to five magnet schools that offered Digital Animation studies. He was accepted in all and decides to study 3D Animation. This year he will be completing his last grade. He assures that studying with his teacher Mr. Torres is something that amuses him a lot.

Between 2018-2019, he began learning how to use Garage Band and Harmony Toom Boom with the help of the “Animation Gets Real” group. Since then, he began to acquire knowledge about these programs that he has continued to use with small videos that he makes in his spare time,

Arturo is working on his new YouTube channel that he has called “The Grey Guy”, a platform in which he seeks to identify his ideas, his points of view on specific topics and his creativity to its maximum expression.

For Arturo, (The Grey Guy as he likes to be called in his networks) animation has become a way of life, where his imagination is fired with real or fictitious characters that he crosses in epic stories that flutter in his head. Stories that sometimes come to light, and many others remain browsing their world where autism, more than a diagnosis, is a way of living.

Chris Castillo

Instructor

Animator, Storyboard Artist

Chris is an animator, character designer and story artist. He has a BFA in Animation from Woodbury University from Burbank, CA and has more than 3 years of experience in teaching animation to young children and young adults on the autism spectrum.

Since 4 years old drawing with his etch n’ sketch art, cartoons were always huge facets of his life. As long as he can remember in school, Chris was always your typical best artist in the classroom. Disney films like “Beauty and The Beast” and the “The Lion King” fascinated him growing up along with non-Disney films like “An American Tail”. More importantly, he was interested in watching the behind the scenes content that took him through the process of creating an entire film. The art and amount of drawing completely captured Chris’s attention through his high school and early college years.

When Chris finally learned that he could build a career making cartoons, he knew that he had to find a school that would give me the tools to do so. Chris was accepted into Woodbury University for their animation program and every class fascinated him as someone who was new to animation. When the time came to intern, Dani Bowman of Danimation Entertainment gave him an opportunity to pass on the same passion to new artists and storytellers.