TED Community » Atul Rao

About Me

Atul’s expertise has been utilized to develop original and branded/literary properties in the international markets and currently shares his knowledge and experience as a Professor at Mohawk College.

For over 26 years, Atul N. Rao has been a writer/producer and performer for theatre, television and feature film in Toronto, Los Angeles, and India. Starting as a staff writer at Nelvana, he wrote for animated hits such as Babar, Carebears, Beetlejuice and Tintin. Atul toured with children's theatre as a writer and puppeteer and later joined a successful Toronto comedy troupe, “The Lost Tribe” as head writer/performer. Later, he spent four years as producer, writer and on-air performer for YTV Canada.

Atul moved to Los Angeles when Fox Family Worldwide hired him to be Co-Executive Producer of their Interstitial programming. Atul co-produced and co-created four live-action hosted shows and 300 shorts for Fox. Atul later co-created and developed concepts and pilots for Nicktoons, Warner Brothers and Cartoon Network.

In 2002, Atul was recruited to Toonz Animation India in senior management where he helped transform Toonz from a service company to international producer working with major Hollywood studios in financing and production.

Recently Atul was commissioned for story developement on a "Lego Star Wars" special. In 2010 Atul also developed a series for Marvel, "The Defenders". Prior to that, Atul produced a series for Marvel Animation, called “Wolverine & the X-Men”. For the pan-Asian market, Atul produced a series for Disney Channel Asia, “Legends”. For the Indian market, Atul was story editor for Cartoon Network Asia's, “Tales of Lord Shiva” and wrote the Bollywood feature film "Twinergy". In 2007 Atul was a unit producer for "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden". In addition, Atul writes freelance scripts for internation HIT TV shows such as MARVEL'S "Super Hero Squad", "Wolverine" and Nerdcorps "League of Super Evil". He also wrote Teletoon's, "1001 Nights", "Apollo's Pad" and Disney's "Ella the Elephant". In 2011 Atul was story editor on Discovery Channel's "Prank Science".

As a professor, Atul teaches classes in scriptwriting, studio production, documentary and live presentations.