Steve Segal


Steve Segal is an American animator and filmmaker who collaborated with Phil Trumbo in the production of the cult classic Futuropolis, an avant garde space-travel film parody which started in the mid-1970s as a nine-minute short but has been growing in size and impact ever since. He teaches animation at the California College of the Arts and has also been a professor in the animation department
at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, California.
He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1972.

Honors, awards, and community activity

Steve Segal has produced independent short films which have won awards at international film festivals, including Cannes International Film Festival, Zagreb Animation Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Sinking Creek Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Animation Celebration film festival.
He worked on the 2014 CCA group project Domoic Acid Attack, which was made for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausolito, California to generate awareness of the problem of domoic acid affecting the food chain of sea lions. His performance piece Outside the Box won first place in the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Segal attended and wrote a review of the Hiroshima International Film Festival in 2016.

Animation and film production

Futuropolis, the creation of Steve Segal and Phil Trumbo, premiered in 1984 at the Biograph Theatre near Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Futuropolis is a combination of real film, imaginative clunky sets, live actors, and animation. NYT movie critic Janet Maslin has said that Futuropolis was "very legitimately billed as 'The World's Smallest Epic.'" Both Segal and Trumbo were graduates of VCU and closely collaborated on early animation projects in Richmond.