Fumi Kitahara

Fumi is an independent PR and awards consultant who has worked in the animation space for over 30 years. She began her career at Disney during the heyday of such classic films as The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Toy Story. She then went on to head up publicity for DreamWorks Animation at their inception, working on everything from The Prince of Egypt and the early Shrek films to Chicken Run, Madagascar and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In 2007, Fumi left DreamWorks to open her own boutique firm, the pr kitchen. As a seasoned consultant, Fumi contributed to the publicity and awards campaigns for the Oscar®-winning animated film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, as well as many Oscar®-nominated films such as Coraline, How to Train Your Dragon, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Kubo and the Two Strings, Mirai, Klaus, I Lost My Body, Over the Moon, and The Mitchells vs. The Machines. Over the past 15 years, she has also worked on such Oscar®-winning animated shorts as: Netflix’s If Anything Happens I Love You, The Windshield Wiper and the BBC and Apple TV+’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, and has overseen campaigns for many Oscar®-nominated animated short films as well, from Magic Light Pictures’ trio of The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Revolting Rhymes and Tonko House’s The Dam Keeper to Weekends, Cartoon Saloon’s Late Afternoon and Aardman’s Robin Robin, among others. She has also worked with Google Spotlight Stories and Baobab Studios on multiple projects over the years. Fumi has served as the PR Chair for Women in Animation for the past 10 years and is a member of the PR branch of the Academy.