CMU grad engineers magic at Walt Disney World
Lori Kipp, a Disney Imagineer and CMU alum, designs the hidden systems that bring beloved characters to life and ensures that every blink, smile, and movement feels natural.
When visiting a theme park, guests don’t think about what made their favorite character blink or smile, they just feel the magic of their favorite story coming to life. That’s by design.
As an Imagineer at Walt Disney World, Lori Kipp (MechE ’21) works behind the scenes to design the systems that make that magic possible. Her work lives at the intersection of engineering precision and storytelling restraint to make sure that nothing mechanical ever pulls guests out of the story.
Mechanical Engineering alumna Lori Kipp tests out the Tiana ride.
Kipp’s team designs the intricate systems that give animatronic characters their range of motion. She analyzes materials and engineering constraints to determine how skins attach to head mechanisms, how they deform under pressure, and how repeated movements affect the surface over time. This ensures that every smile, blink, and movement feels natural.
“It’s like playing really advanced Tetris,” Kipp laughed. “We’re constantly working with constraints because creative integrity is nonnegotiable. We can’t change who a character is by making them eight-feet-tall to hold all of the mechanical systems. We have to make the engineering work around the character.”
Her work demands close collaboration across disciplines. Mechanical systems must integrate seamlessly with animation, costume design, hair and makeup, lighting, sound, and show control.
“It’s not just engineering,” she says. “We have to understand how fabrics, paint, hair, electronics, and control systems contribute to the illusion and help us conceal the mechanical pieces.”
In January 2024, Kipp hit the ground running as an Imagineering intern working on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. For months, her focus was on making sure the mechanical systems supporting the characters worked exactly as intended. After the attraction opened, she transitioned into a full-time position in skin systems and surface development. Now, any new character project that comes through the Walt Disney World Parks passes across her desk.
Kipp says her experiences at CMU are a key reason she’s where she is today. In order to explore both the technical and human sides of experience, Kipp balanced mechanical engineering with a second major in psychology and a minor in robotics. From designing educational escape room puzzles to creating themed transportation systems for her honors thesis, she learned how to combine storytelling, user perception, and hands-on engineering in ways that directly translate to entertainment engineering.
“The freedom to explore different disciplines shaped how I think about problems,” she said. “At CMU, I learned to take something that’s technical and make it feel human, and that’s exactly what I do now when I engineer systems to support a story rather than distract from it.”
Kipp went on to receive her Master of Entertainment Technology from the CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center in 2023. In that program, she further bridged the gap between theory and practice by building interactive virtual worlds, designing animatronic prototypes, and developing immersive museum experiences.
“When I was a little kid, I told my parents I wanted to be a ‘story engineer’ without even knowing what that meant. Because CMU taught me how to combine curiosity, creativity, and engineering, I get to be a ‘story engineer’ on a scale that touches thousands of people, every single day.”