Bill Jarcho

For nearly 40 years, Bill Jarcho has explored what becomes possible when creativity, humor, and social imagination meet.

An artist, animator, cartoonist, puppeteer, and director, Bill has worked across an unusually wide range of forms, from award-winning animated films and children’s books to surreal paintings, giant puppets, political spectacle, and community art. His work often carries a sense of playful oddness alongside a deeper social conscience, using humor and imagination to approach subjects that might otherwise divide, overwhelm, or shut us down.

Bill began his animation career in the 1980s and went on to create and direct work for Nickelodeon, MTV, ABC, Fox, and others, including directing episodes of Eddie Murphy’s animated series The PJs. His independent animated films have screened at festivals around the world, and he later founded and directed the Conscious Cartoons International Animation Festival, celebrating animation capable of being funny, strange, beautiful, and socially awake at the same time.

For more than two decades, Bill has also worked with the Backbone Campaign, designing and leading the creation of giant puppets, inflatables, costumes, and other forms of creative public expression used in social and political movements. At the heart of this work is a belief in art not simply as something to observe, but as something we can make together: a way of transforming how we relate, disrupting familiar ways of seeing, and giving form to possibilities that do not yet exist.

Bill lives and works on Vashon Island, Washington, where he continues to make art, draw cartoons, write, build strange things, and explore the role that play and creativity can have in our shared lives.