Marc Petit

Marc Petit leads Autodesk Media & Entertainment as Senior Vice President. In this role, he guides the design and development of Autodesk’s digital entertainment creation and visual communication products.

With Petit at the helm, Autodesk M&E has pioneered new and unprecedented techniques in visual storytelling for the television, games and film industries, including the virtual production workflows used in the groundbreaking projects Avatar and Tintin.

The last 16  Academy Awards® for Visual Effects have gone to films that made extensive use of Autodesk software, a streak that began with the iconic Jurassic Park (1993) and continued through Forrest Gump (1994),  Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003), Avatar (2009) and last year’s winner, Inception.

Petit joined Autodesk in 2002 after serving as Vice President of 3D Products at Softimage. Prior to that, Petit made his mark as a leading innovator in digital animation, developing “Paris 1789,” one of the world’s first computer-generated films.

A native of France, Petit was studying to be a telecom engineer at Institut National des Télécommunications in Paris when a trip to a tradeshow introduced him to creative computing. For the first time, Petit witnessed the creation of pictures and graphics with computers and found it far more interesting than anything related to telecom. After earning his graduate engineering degree, Petit joined 3D software pioneer Thomson Digital Image (TDI) in 1987, entering the field of computer graphics virtually at its inception.

Although Petit believes that Autodesk Media & Entertainment’s greatest achievements are yet to be realized, he is proud of the company’s commitment to its customers, as well as its accomplishments in driving innovation across all of the industries it serves.