Ellen Woodbury

Ellen Woodbury (born August 10, 1962) is an American stone sculptor, former Disney directing animator and character animator who worked at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Woodbury grew up in Corning, New York, and she earned a BFA in Film and Art from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. She attended the Experimental Animation program at the California Institute of the Arts under the mentorship of Jules Engel.

Animator at Disney
Woodbury worked for over 20 years at Walt Disney Feature Animation where she worked as an animator on films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King where she supervised the creation of the hornbill Zazu. She was Disney's first female directing animator.

Full-time sculptor
She moved to Loveland, Colorado in 2005 to become a full-time sculptor. She taught Character Animation at the Art Institute of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, and ran a character animation workshop along with her class each week. In 2019, the National Sculpture Society presented Woodbury with the 2019 Marilyn Newmark Memorial Grant.