Michael J. Black

Michael Black is a Vice President of Digital Human Research at Epic Games, an Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems where he was a founding director, and an Honorarprofessor at the University of Tübingen. Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (1985), his M.S. from Stanford (1989), and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1992). He has held positions at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, and Brown University. He was also a Distinguished Amazon Scholar (2017-2021) and served as the Speaker of Cyber Valley, on of Europe’s largest AI ecosystems. He is a recipient of the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2025 Mark Everingham Prize, and six “test of time” awards including the 2024 and 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH Asia test-of-time award, the 2010 and 2022 Koenderink Prize, the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Prize, and the 2013 Helmholtz Prize. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2013 he co-founded Body Labs Inc., which was acquired by Amazon in 2017. In 2018 he co-founded Meshcapade GmbH, which joined Epic Games in 2026.