John Dods

Born in December 1948, in Plainfield, New Jersey, John Dods has been described by CNN as "one of the world's foremost masters of disguise." Dods has created makeups ranging from the AIDS victims of Longtime Companion (1989), to the aliens, vampires, and zombies of the TV-series Monsters (1988), to the Beast in Disney's Broadway musical (1994-2007). Other Broadway credits include Prosthetic Design for "The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein" (2007) and "The Toxic Avenger Musical" (2009). Dods professional breakthrough happened in 1983 when his mechanical monsters for the indie-feature The Deadly Spawn (1983) appeared on 6 magazine covers and acquired cult status on Internet websites. Dods fabricated Matt Dillon's death by train crash for A Kiss Before Dying (1991), turned Whoopi Goldberg into a statue for Naked in New York (1994), and Grace Jones into a corpse for Boomerang (1992). In 1998, then Vice-president Al Gore wore prosthetic by John Dods when he and wife Tipper went costumed as Beauty and the Beast to a Halloween ball. A "Theatre Crafts International" award recipient in 1997 for his work on Disney's Broadway show "Beauty and the Beast", Dods is the Prosthetic Designer for 7 international productions of B&B worldwide. Dod's creations have appeared on both the Tony Awards (1992 & 2008), Academy Awards (1990), The Kennedy Center Honors Telecast (2009), and the floor of the New York Stock Exchange - when The Toxic Avenger rang the opening bell on 8/31/09. John Dod's work has appeared on the covers of film and theater magazines 26 times. John Dods is an award winning stop-motion filmmaker whose animation models have appeared in in the network documentary "SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back", the CNN series "Future Watch", the TV series "Monsters", and numerous television commercials (see "Other credits"). In 1989, John Dods supervised the construction of the "Ice Age" miniature set for Universal Studio's "Back To the Future" theme park attraction. Dods articles on films and filmmaking have appeared for over 30 years, in "Starlog","Fangoria", "Cinemagic", "Scarlet Street", "Stop-Motion Magazine", "The Bolex Reporter", "Van Helsing's Journal", "Cinemagicians", and "Scarlett: The Fim Magazine"