John Alan Lasseter (born January 12, 1957) is an Academy Award-winning American animator, director and the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is also currently the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.

Lasseter's father was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership, while his mother was an art teacher at Medomak Valley High School. John grew up in Whittier, California. His mother being an art teacher contributed to his growing preoccuption with animation. He often drew cartoons during church services at the Church of Christ his family attended. As a child, Lasseter would race home from school to watch Chuck Jones cartoons on television.His education began at Pepperdine University. It was the alma mater of both his parents and his siblings. However, he heard of a new program at California Institute of the Arts and decided to leave Pepperdine to follow his dream of becoming an animator. His mother further encouraged him to take up a career in animation, and in 1975 he enrolled as the second student in a new animation course at the California Institute of the Arts. Lasseter was taught by three members of Disney's Nine Old Men – Eric Larson, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston – his classmates included Brad Bird, John Musker and Tim Burton. On May 2, 2009, Lasseter received an Honorary Doctorate degree from Pepperdine University. He gave a commencement address where he encouraged the graduating class of more than 500 students never to let anyone kill their dreams.

On graduation, Lasseter joined The Walt Disney Company, as a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland in Anaheim. Lasseter later obtained a job as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation, but felt something was missing; after 101 Dalmatians, which in his opinion was the film where Disney had reached its highest plateau, the studio had sort of died and was just repeating itself without adding any new ideas or innovations. In 1980 or 1981 he coincidently came across some video tapes from one of the then new computer-graphics conferences, who showed some of the very beginnings of computer animation, like floating spheres and such, which he experienced as a revelation. But it wasn't until shortly after, when he was invited by his friends Jerry Rees and Bill Kroyer, while working on Mickey's Christmas Carol, to come and see the first lightcycle sequences for an upcoming film entitled Tron, featuring (then) state-of-the-art computer generated imagery, that he really saw the huge potential of this new technology in animation. Up to that time, the studio had used a multiplane camera to add depth to its animation. Lasseter realized that computers could be used to make movies with three dimensional backgrounds where traditionally animated characters could interact to add a new, visually stunning depth that had not been conceived before.