About Ryzo Studios

Where play
meets purpose.

Ryzo Studios makes films, games, and live events for kids 10 and up. We're a small team out of Pixar, Google, and Warner Bros., working alongside clinicians who study how kids actually handle the hard stuff.

Principles

How we work.

Entertainment comes first.

We make things kids want to watch and play, using everything that makes a story work: character, stakes, emotion, surprise, fun. Impact that doesn't entertain first is homework, and kids can tell the difference.

We create franchises.

We build story worlds, not one-off titles. A film, a game, a live event, and eventually books and merch, all sharing one world — so a kid can enter anywhere and go deeper in any direction. We own the IP outright, which is what makes that possible.

We build toward action.

Each franchise starts from a question we can answer plainly: after a kid experiences this, what can they do differently? That answer shapes everything we make next.

Founders

Where it started.

Erica Milsom

Founder / CEO

Writer, director, and creative executive with 20 years at Pixar Animation Studios, where she pioneered the studio's unscripted programming strategy for Disney+. Director of Loop, featuring Pixar's first non-verbal autistic character, and Emmy-nominated Co-Showrunner of Inside Pixar.

Selected as a Bellagio Center Resident by The Rockefeller Foundation, the sole animation professional among an international cohort of world leaders. Leads Ryzo's first franchise.

Todd Shaiman

Co-Founder & President

Production strategist and technologist with 10 years at Pixar, where he led workflow innovations on Up, Inside Out, and Brave. Founded Google's award-winning Immersive Arts team and co-invented AI collaboration tools, two patents, now shipping across Google Workspace's 3 billion users.

Leadership

Suzanne Slatcher

Chief Technology Officer

Animation director and creative technologist, 25+ years across feature film, TV, and web. At Pixar she built sequences and environments for Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, and The Incredibles. Leads the pipeline that lets a team this size ship at this scale.

Tehya Kopp

Chief Impact Officer

Marketing, strategy, and operations leadership from 20+ years at Warner Bros., where she ran global operations across 18 countries. Works with changemakers to turn plans into results.

Advisors

Who we build with.

We develop our work in partnership with researchers and clinicians. We choose individuals over institutions on purpose: we'd rather have the person who wrote the book in a story meeting than a logo on a slide.

Dr. Judy Chu

Stanford University

Studies how boys lose access to their emotional lives in early adolescence. Author of When Boys Become Boys, and chair of the Movember Foundation's global men's health advisory committee.

Dr. Jon Brandt

Adobe Research

Founded Adobe's Media Intelligence Lab. Advises on the AI-forward pipeline that lets a small team ship franchise-scale work.

Dr. Gowri Aragam

UCSF

Harvard-trained psychiatrist. Co-founded Stanford's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation and built Pinterest's compassionate search features. Keeps our emotional content clinically sound.