About Ryzo Studios

Where play
meets purpose.

We're collaborators, researchers, and creative obsessives. Founded by Pixar veterans, fueled by our audience and what the stories mean to them — we test things, we play things, we make things that actually work.

Founders

Where it started.

Erica Milsom

Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer

Writer, director, and creative executive with 20 years at Pixar Animation Studios, where she pioneered the studio's unscripted programming strategy for Disney+. Director of Loop — featuring Pixar's first non-verbal autistic character — and Emmy-nominated Co-Showrunner of Inside Pixar.

Selected as a Bellagio Center Resident by The Rockefeller Foundation as the sole animation professional among an international cohort of world leaders. Currently building an animation and activation franchise that gives boys permission to feel.

Todd Shaiman

Co-Founder & President

Production strategist and technologist with 10 years at Pixar, where he led workflow innovations on Oscar-winning films including Up, Inside Out, and Brave. Founded Google's award-winning Immersive Arts team and co-invented AI collaboration tools — two patents — now integrated across Google Workspace's 3 billion users.

Brings a rare combination of creative production mastery and large-scale technology leadership to Ryzo's mission.

Advisors

What informs
the work.

Dr. Judy Chu

Stanford University

Lecturer in Human Biology and a leading expert on boys' emotional development. Author of When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity and Chair of the Movember Foundation's Global Men's Health Advisory Committee.

Dr. Jon Brandt

Adobe Research Fellow

Adobe Research Fellow who founded the Media Intelligence Lab, contributing vision and imaging technologies across Adobe's product line. Led efforts to re-envision AI-powered photo editing and advanced natural language understanding for PDFs. Prior to Adobe, worked at Silicon Graphics and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab on the Galileo project. Holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Davis.

Dr. Gowri Aragam

UCSF

Harvard-trained psychiatrist and Assistant Professor at UCSF. Co-founder of Stanford's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation and former Director of Mental Health Product Development. Partnered with Pinterest to develop compassionate search features. Host and creator of the Sense of Self podcast.

Scott Shigeoka

UC Berkeley · Eames Institute

Internationally recognized curiosity expert, TED speaker, and award-winning author of Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World. His work focuses on how we can strengthen our well-being and relationships through the practice of curiosity.

Leadership