Image credit: From left to right: Nora Wixom, Carrie Paff, and Charles Poynton
Clear communication can be the difference between an idea being overlooked and one that truly resonates. In the latest episode of SIGGRAPH Spotlight, host Nora Wixom, SIGGRAPH 2026 Courses Co-Chair, sits down with Carrie Paff and Charles Poynton to explore why presentation anxiety is so pervasive and how to move past it. Together, they share practical, experience-driven strategies for communicating with confidence on stage, on camera, and across SIGGRAPH’s evolving presentation formats, especially when the stakes are high.
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About Our Guests
Nora Wixom is a digital creative who seeks to create conscientious, enabling technology and further blur the lines between computation and artistry. Prior to her time in tech, she worked as a Character Technical Director at Industrial Light and Magic, where her credited feature films included “Kong: Skull Island”, “Jurassic World”, and “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi”. She then leveraged her VFX industry skills to generate datasets that trained computer vision-based machine learning models for the Vision Pro, Apple’s inaugural augmented reality headset. Nora is a passionate advocate for STEM education, dedicated to empowering learners of all ages and experience levels. She has volunteered with organizations like Girls Who Code and the California Academy of Sciences and has guest lectured at institutions such as Columbia and MIT. In addition to her commitment to education, she seeks to deepen her relationship to technology through her digital artistic practice, which centers themes of ownership, authenticity, power dynamics, and representation. Most recently, she has studied at the School for Poetic Computation and was invited to participate in the IAAT artist workshop hosted by Zero1.org in 2022. Currently based in Los Angeles, Nora works as a software engineer at Apple, where she focuses on developing artist tools and applications for the Vision Pro.
Carrie Paff works internationally as an actor, educator, and leadership consultant. As a Senior Director with Stand & Deliver, she helps organizations shape their narratives and create healthy, high-performing cultures – while empowering individuals to find their authentic voices and ascend to the next level of leadership.
She is an accomplished stage actor with 25 years of leading roles Off-Broadway and regionally. She can be heard in Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory and the Toy Story 4 short Lamp Life. Carrie is also the co-founder of StageWrite, a thriving non-profit building literacy through theater in San Francisco elementary schools. She holds a B.A. in Theatre Arts and Women’s Studies with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Educational Theatre from New York University.
Charles Poynton is a longtime SIGGRAPH contributor, whose SIGGRAPH 2002 talk “Panic-Free Public Speaking” remains one of the most talked-about and frequently cited presentations in the conference’s history.
