Haldean grew up on a farm in Ohio before moving to Antwerp, Belgium as a photography-obsessed pre-teen. He came back to the US to study Theater and Computer Animation in New York City, and worked various technical and creative roles in (off-)off-Broadway theaters before moving to San Francisco and working in the tech industry for almost a decade. Now he is an Oakland-based film director and a character artist at Pixar, and is particularly excited by stories about people's relationships to nature and the way technology both gathers and isolates us.