Duke Johnson (director)

For the American football player, see Duke Johnson.

Duke Johnson is an American film director who specializes in stop-motion animation. He currently serves as a director and junior partner for Dino Stamatopoulos's animation production studio Starburns Industries in Burbank, California.

Johnson was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended high school at St. John Vianney High School, and attended a summer film course at Columbia College Chicago between his second and third years of high school. He graduated from the film school at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he spent a semester studying animation in Prague. After graduating, he spent three years working as a waiter in a New York restaurant before moving to Los Angeles, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory in 2006. At AFI, he directed his student film Marrying God, for which he won 8 awards for best student film or best short film.

Johnson has been nominated for Annie Awards in 2011 and 2012 for directing stop-motion episodes of shows such as Mary Shelley's Frankenhole and Community. In 2016, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in the 88th Academy Awards for directing the film Anomalisa.