Adam Paloian (born September 9, 1991; age 34) is a former SpongeBob SquarePants crew member who worked as a supervising director.
Biography[]
Outside of SpongeBob, Paloian has worked on the TV series Pig Goat Banana Cricket and the TV short Bushworld Adventures.
He joined the SpongeBob SquarePants crew on August 9, 2013, working as a character layout artist on The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.[1] After the second movie, he would go on to work on the series as a storyboard artist on Sherm Cohen's team during season 9 and early season 10.
Paloian became a storyboard supervisor starting with "Unreal Estate," and was later credited as a supervising director starting with "The Getaway." He served as one of the three main supervising directors of the show during seasons 10 to 12, alongside Sherm Cohen and Dave Cunningham. On April 5, 2019, Paloian left the series to work on the Netflix original animated series The Cuphead Show![2] Before his departure, he also worked as a character designer for the episode "Who R Zoo?."
In 2022, Paloian briefly returned to the series as a storyboard director on the season 13 episodes "Delivery to Monster Island," "Mandatory Music," "FUN-Believable," and "Swimming Fools." He also contributed on Plankton: The Movie very early on during its development, but was left uncredited.[3][4]
He also worked on The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants around that same time, as a lead character designer.
In 2023, he founded the animation production company Pinreel Inc., whose first project was the Tenacious D music video "Video Games" which Paloian directed with animator Chris O'Neill. Pinreel would later provide the CG animation for season 16's "Go Fetch!," which also marks another brief return to the series for Paloian, who served as the writer, director, and executive producer of the episode.