SINGAPORE – The Lord Of The Rings did not just entertain Amanda Koh. The Oscar-winning epic fantasy film trilogy (2001 to 2003) based on British writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved tomes also rewired her life.
As a teenager, she was more fascinated by how the series’ fictional setting of Middle-earth was made, than by the elves and epic battles on-screen.
Through the behind-the-scenes featurettes, Koh saw how New Zealand film-maker Peter Jackson and his team cloned armies with software, built worlds from polygons and pixels, and painted light into every frame.
“That was the first time I got to see software being used and visual effects, how it was being made,” she recalls. “And then I was like, oh, I think this is actually a viable career for me to pursue.”
Two decades on, the girl who once filled her primary school notebooks with Dragon Ball Z doodles is an Emmy-winning creative director and motion designer based in Los Angeles.
On May 25, Koh picked up an Emmy at the 47th Sports Emmy Awards for Outstanding Sports Graphic Design: Specialty for her work in documentary mini-series Believers: Boston Red Sox (2025).
The Sports Emmys honour excellence in sports television and fall under the same Emmy Awards umbrella as the better-known Primetime and Daytime Emmys.
Singaporean art director Amanda Koh (right) with director Lauren Fisher at the 47th Sports Emmy Awards.
PHOTO: NATIONAL ACADEMY OF TELEVISION ARTS AND SCIENCES
That places Koh, 37, in a very small club. She is believed to be the third Singaporean to win an individual Emmy of any kind.
Director and storyboard artist Samantha Suyi Lee won the Children’s and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in March 2025 for her work on the animated superhero series Moon Girl And Devil Dinosaur (2023 to 2025), a Disney Television Animation production.
In 2000, film-maker Nora Fong received an Emmy for her music video If This Life Is Everlasting under the College Television Awards, also known as the College Emmys.
For Koh, the coveted gold statuette feels less like a finish line than an amplifier.
“I think generally, people’s curiosity is piqued,” she tells The Straits Times. “I definitely received more e-mails and LinkedIn requests.”
On the home front, Koh said her parents were both proud and emotional about her Emmy win, especially because they could watch the ceremony live on YouTube despite the time difference.
The recognition caps a journey that began in 2005 at Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP)’s digital media design programme, then a fledgling course with few local predecessors. Options for animation in Singapore were so limited that Koh remembers cutting out an ST clipping on the “top 10 schools in animation” and using it to plan her next move.
“This feels like kind of a full-circle moment,” she says.
From NYP, she went to Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, and after completing her computer animation degree, she hustled her way to Los Angeles. Thanks to a recommendation from her school department head, Koh landed a gig at visual effects studio Greenhaus GFX in 2013.
The work as a 3D designer and animator was unglamorous up close – long hours, countless iterations, juggling client notes – but surreal on the big screen. One early thrill was helping on the iconic Columbia Pictures logo.
“I was rendering some of the moving clouds,” she says. After staring at frames on a monitor for weeks, seeing them fill a cinema screen was “kind of crazy… you are just taken up by the scale of it”.
Over the years, Koh’s animation portfolio has stretched from creating trailer campaigns for Marvel movies like Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014), to being main and end title sequence art director on Wonder Woman (2017) and horror hit Insidious: The Last Key (2018).
She went on to sports and character-driven documentaries, creating motion and animated graphic sequences on Netflix’s Simone Biles Rising (2024) and ESPN’s In The Arena: Serena Williams (2024).
Today, she is the founder and creative director of Morph & Muse, a motion-design studio specialising in title design, show graphics packages and campaign visuals for film, television and branding. Koh’s work often straddles the roles of creative director, art director and hands-on motion designer.
For Believers: Boston Red Sox, she worked closely with directors Lauren Fisher and Gotham Chopra, and led the art direction for motion graphics and title design to tell the story through the lens of the fans.
The Emmy, Koh says, is not just personal validation, but also a signal that a Singaporean woman in a highly technical corner of Hollywood can lead major projects – and a beacon for younger creatives back home.
“The same way watching The Lord Of The Rings back in the day showed me that this is a viable industry, I hope more women and more people from Singapore can pursue their passion too,” she says.
Correction note: This story has been edited for clarity.
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