Carolyn Mazanec grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where her sleepy suburban upbringing inspired the backdrop for her writing. In high school, she published a novel called A Pink House, a coming-of-age story about self-discovery and friendship — a thread that runs through nearly everything she's made since.
She went on to study Communications, English, and Film at Northwestern University, where she found her love for screenwriting. Her script Casey Blatt placed as a semi-finalist in the 2018 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Script Competition.
After graduating, Carolyn met Tiajha Nakahara and Genevieve Diaz in the post-production department at MasterClass, and the three of them started working on The Summer of Lexi & Dawn on weekends and lunch breaks — the script placed as a quarter-finalist in the 2019 ScreenCraft Short Film Screenplay Competition. Around the same time, Carolyn and Tiajha (joined by Kevin Lin) began Debbie's Dry Cleaning, a hand-painted webcomic following a magical seamstress in San Francisco.
Carolyn now resides in Oakland, where she works at Pixar and keeps building out an ever-growing slate of personal projects: The Bathroom Attendant, an AI mini-series inspired by her dog Gary; Poor Dave, an animated sitcom about the zombie apocalypse; The Coat, a 3-minute short film she wrote and directed, spearheading the creation of a new AI / animation hybrid pipeline at Pixar; and a new web series in early development about a murder investigation in a sleepy Appalachian town. Across all of it, she's using her work as a testing ground for blending generative AI with traditional animation. When she's not writing or directing, she's usually on a hike with Gary.
