Craig Barron (born April 6, 1961) is an American creative director and film historian who specializes in seamless matte painting effects. Starting at Industrial Light & Magic, and at his own VFX studio, Matte World Digital, Barron worked on or supervised the crews to create the matte painting effects of more than a hundred films, including The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, Casino, Zodiac, Hugo, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which he won the Academy Award for best visual effects. Barron is an AMPAS lecturer and exhibition curator, a TCM guest-host, and a University educator with a focus on the history and techniques of visual effects of classic studio films and the digital age. He's featured in documentary supplements for several Criterion Blue-Ray editions, demonstrating classic effects on films by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Alfred Hitchcock, using computer animations. He co-authored with Mark Cotta Vaz the first book on the history of movie matte-painting, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. Barron is the creative director at Magnopus, a visual development company in Los Angeles.