Storyboard Artist for Animated Spider-Man

Samantha Suyi Lee: Emmy Winner is

- 

Director and storyboard artist Samantha Suyi Lee moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to be with her husband, an American, but it was to be a journey that would result in her winning an Emmy.

"My husband, after working in Singapore for many years, decided to go home and I acquiesced. It turned out to be a great career decision, though I still miss the food in Singapore," says the 36-year-old.

Getting her foot in the door of the competitive American animation industry involved drastic steps.

"I took a good, hard look at my portfolio. It wasn't going to cut it in LA. I had been coasting for 4 1/2 years in an animation studio in Singapore and never took the time to update it. So, I sat down for six months to start a whole new story portfolio from scratch," says the alumna of Nanyang Technological University's School of Art, Design and Media, who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Animation.

Lee then applied to as many positions as she could, facing a number of dead ends. She eventually found her first US position as a freelance story artist at DreamWorks Animation Television on science-fiction show Cleopatra In Space (2020 to 2021).

"Despite how underpaid I was as a freelancer, I gave it my all," she says.