Lee Unkrich

Lee Unkrich is an American film director, editor, and animator best known for his long tenure at Pixar Animation Studios, where he contributed to multiple blockbuster animated features. Joining Pixar in 1994 as an editor on early projects like Toy Story and A Bug's Life, he advanced to co-directing Toy Story 2 (1999) before making his solo directorial debut with Toy Story 3 (2010). That film earned him the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, with the project also receiving a nomination for Best Picture. Unkrich's subsequent directorial effort, Coco (2017), similarly won the Best Animated Feature Oscar and the Best Original Song award for "Remember Me." After 25 years at the studio, he departed Pixar in January 2019 to prioritize family time and explore neglected personal interests.

Lee Unkrich was born on August 8, 1967, in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the nearby suburb of Chagrin Falls as the only child of Emilie Unkrich and Robert Unkrich. His father, a World War II veteran with English and German ancestry, worked as an artist and converted to Judaism, while his mother descended from an Ashkenazi Jewish family; Unkrich was raised in the Jewish faith within this Reform Jewish household.