Rafael Castelblanco

Rafael Castelblanco is a Colombian-born designer, educator, and visual effects artist based in New York City, whose career connects industrial design, computer graphics, and digital storytelling. With a background in Industrial Design and an MFA from Pratt Institute, Rafael’s creative approach unites the physical language of form, light, and proportion with the evolving possibilities of 3D visual media.

He worked full-time at Blue Sky Studios as a Lighting Technical Director, contributing to the acclaimed animated films Ice Age and Robots. For later productions such as Ice Age: The Meltdown and Horton Hears a Who!, Rafael continued to collaborate as a freelance lighting and compositing artist, extending his expertise across multiple feature projects.

In New York City, he served as 3D CG Director at R/GA, leading teams to produce complex, visually rich advertising campaigns and overseeing all stages of production — from pre-production and on-set VFX supervision to 3D rendering and final compositing. At Broadway Video, he worked as 3D Director, guiding smaller, agile teams in developing high-end visuals for broadcast and commercial work.

Rafael’s broad freelance career in New York has included collaborations with premier studios such as Psyop, Click3x, and Shilo 3D Studio, where he worked on projects blending design, animation, and visual effects for television and branded content. His experience extends to Baraboom Studios, where he contributed to the feature film Sinners (2024, dir. Ryan Coogler) in both previsualization and postproduction using Unreal Engine, Maya, Arnold, and Nuke.

At Pratt Institute, Rafael teaches courses in both the undergraduate and graduate programs in Digital Arts and Animation, sharing his expertise with students in 3D Animation Studio, Lighting and Rendering, and Expressive Motion. His teaching integrates Rowena Reed Kostellow’s spatial design principles with contemporary 3D production practices, encouraging students to approach animation and visual storytelling as both technical and artistic exploration.

Rafael has recently expanded his practice to include Artificial Intelligence in visual education, experimenting with AI-assisted image generation and creative ideation to enhance design thinking and imagination in the classroom.

Grounded in his Latin American perspective and shaped by his New York experience, Rafael’s work celebrates the dialogue between craft and technology, merging the tactile and the digital to advance 3D media as a language of innovation and expression.

MFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, May 1990 – Concentration in 3D Design and Animation
Bachelor of Industrial Design, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia, December 1986