Harvey Deneroff, PhD, is an independent animation scholar based in Los Angeles, whose career spans writing, editing and teaching. His special expertise is in animation labor history and is currently writing Popeye the Union Man: The Rise and Fall of the Screen Cartoonists Guild to be published by the University of California Press. He is also coauthoring Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho: Animation Artists at Work, with Victoria Deneroff—a book of essays examining the social and artistic practices in the animation industry using social practice theory and cultural-historical activity theory. Harvey is the founder and past president of the Society for Animation Studies. Deneroff began his career as associate editor of the American Film Institute Catalog and then headed the AFI’s Film Information Office. For Killiam Shows, he did restoration work on D.W. Griffith Biograph films, before committing himself fully to animation; this was a rather easy decision, since his dad, Joe Deneroff, had worked for Fleischer and Famous Studios.

Harvey served as the first editor of both Animation Magazine and Animation World Magazine (awn.com), edited ASIFA-Hollywood’s Graffiti, and The Animation Report, an industry newsletter he published. He was a regular contributor to The Hollywood Reporter and Animatoon (published in South Korea), and was also published in Sight and Sound, Film History, The Los Angeles Times, Skwigly and Animation Journal. He authored The Art of Anastasia (HarperCollins, 1997) and co-authored animation producer Fred Ladd’s Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon (McFarland, 2008); he also contributed to John Canemaker’s Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the Animated Image (American Film Institute, 1988), John Lent’s Animation in Asia and the Pacific (John Libbey, 2001), and Jerry Beck’s Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, the World of Cartoon, Anime and CGI (Collins Design, 2004).

Deneroff has given numerous papers at conferences of the Society for Animation Studies and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He has done presentations for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and at such festivals as Annecy, Cardiff, Cartoons on the Bay, and Rewind/Fast Forward.  He was festival director of The Week with the Masters Animation Celebration, in Trivandrum, India, and was coordinator of the 1995 Ojai Animation Conference. He taught film, animation and visual effects history and theory at the Savannah College of Art and Design, along with some studio classes. Having retired from teaching, he currently co-chairs the Steering Committee of ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum.

Deneroff will be presenting a lecture at the CCAM.