Hansjeet Singh Duggal

Hansjeet Duggal teaches advanced VFX production and animation technology at Chapman University, bringing direct experience from leading large-scale international production teams and working on prestige film and television projects. His work examines the intersection of creative vision, production infrastructure and emerging technology — specifically how AI-assisted tools reshape the economics and feasibility of episodic visual effects work.

His feature and streaming credits include visual effects work on Avatar: The Way of Water, The Accountant 2, The Instigators (Apple TV+), Air (Amazon), Unstoppable (Amazon), The Greatest Love Story Never Told (Amazon) and Small Things Like These (Hulu), alongside documentary work for PBS and numerous independent animated shorts and features where he has served as animation director.

At Artists Equity, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Duggal built and managed a VFX studio spanning two international territories, scaling from zero to 87 artists while implementing an AI-first production pipeline that improved efficiency by 30-40% without compromising visual quality. This work bridged creative direction, technical problem-solving and cross-cultural team dynamics, the core challenges his students encounter in professional practice.

In the classroom, Duggal teaches the realities of production: how budgets constrain and enable creative choice, how distributed teams operate across time zones and cultures. His pedagogy emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between technical mastery and creative leadership — the skills that distinguish supervisors from technicians.

Duggal holds an MFA in film production from Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and an MS in animation design from Birla Institute of Technology. He currently operates as an independent consultant, delivering AI-led strategy, pipeline architecture and operational systems for animation and VFX studios. He is building an AI-first production pipeline for a new studio across four international territories from zero — a system he has built twice, measured and scaled. His broader practice includes work with a media collective focused on authentic representation of South Asian and diaspora narratives in film and television.