Jules Engel - Continuing His Legacy

Continuing His Legacy

In one of his final major acts, in May 2003, Engel established the Jules Engel Endowed Scholarship Fund. The recipients of the awards are those students who have carried out their work at CalArts in Jules’ name, having demonstrated rigor, daring imagination and great curiosity about the world, leading to inventive, interdisciplinary projects.

Engel was also a painter, and produced a prolific body of oil paintings, lithographs and other graphic artworks. His paintings are in the collections of major museums, and recently there have been exhibits of his work at Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Los Angeles. He was still working on a new series of lithographs just before his death.

Today, many of his students carry out his influence through their work, including John Lasseter, Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Stephen Hillenburg, Joanna Priestley, Christine Panushka, Peter Chung, Glen Keane, Ellen Woodbury, Eric Darnell, Mark Osborne, Steven Subotnick, Patrice Stellest, Janeann Dill and Mark Kirkland.

The Engel Animation Advancement Research Center (EAARC) offers a slate of animated shorts drawn from leading international festivals. The program is structured around the themes of personal struggle and forbidden desire in the context of a polarized, conflicted world.

Former students of Engel, Christine Panushka and Dr. Janeann Dill, currently act as his representatives for some matters (excluding his films, which are not administered by them). Panushka served as the executor as Engel's estate, while Dr. Dill is his biographer. In 2003, Center for Visual Music (CVM) and Cal Arts presented a major retrospective of Engel's films at Redcat Theatre, Los Angeles. Both iotaCenter and CVM have preserved a number of Engel's films in an effort to preserve his cinematic legacy. CVM established the Jules Engel Preservation Project shortly after Jules' death.

In 2008, CalArts celebrated what would have been the 100th Birthday of Engel at REDCAT to continue the Endowed Jules Engel Fellowship, the Jules Engel Centenary Celebration, at which a panel of former students remembered their mentor and where a seven-minute short film of excerpts from a documentary film by Janeann Dill was screened: JULES ENGEL: AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS. See The Institute for Interdisciplinary Art and Creative Intelligence (IIACI), a virtual ThinkTank advancing the critical study and creative practice of the global arts across the disciplines. http://www.interdisciplinaryartinstitute.com/Engel_Documentary.html + http://www.jules-engel.com

The hit 2004 animated film The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is dedicated in his honor.