Michael R. Jones

Michael grew up in Arlington, Washington, a small town about 60 miles north of Seattle. Drs. Thomas. J. Jones & M. Ilene Snyder, his parents, were both dentists. He attended public school in Arlington (primary & elementary), Sacred Heart Villa Academy in Seattle (junior high), Bellarmine Preparatory in Tacoma (high school), and finally Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, where he graduated with a B.A. in Communication Arts/Film & TV Production. While Michael had originally thought to pursue cinematography because of a long-time love affair with light, lenses and machines, once in film school he realized that while film-making was definitely a passion, Cinematography, per se, was not. Luckily, a somewhat more immediate love affair with the original "Star Trek" drew him to Trek conventions and ultimately he ''fell" into makeup by way of a few individuals met through those truly odd affairs. The most significant & influential of these was [then] makeup artist Steve Neill. He was in chimp makeup (from the original "Planet of the Apes")! They became friends & Michael would often hang out & help him around his makeup effects lab. He'd acquired a lot of experience with sculpting teeth, mold-making & the materials involved in his parent's dental labs as a kid, so it was sort of a natural fit as a lot of those products & techniques had been adapted into makeup FX. By the mid 80's Michael had begun to work on set, learning the ropes from other professionals in the film/makeup industry. He worked a lot, mostly on small features and television series' -including "Star Trek, The Next Generation". In the 90's he worked mostly on Network TV "Movie of the Week" fare and was rewarded in 1993 with an Emmy nomination for his work on the '92 NBC TV-Movie, "Babe Ruth" starring Steven Lang.