[7][8] Born in a Mormon family, Catmull was the eldest of five brothers and, as a young man, served as a missionary in the New York City area of the 1960s.

[10] As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's DARPA program,[11] sharing classes with James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay.

[12] During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces.

[21] However, Catmull's team lacked the ability to tell a story effectively via film, harming the effort to produce a motion picture via a computer.

[22] Catmull and his partner, Alvy Ray Smith, attempted to reach out to studios to alleviate this issue, but were generally unsuccessful until they attracted the attention of George Lucas at Lucasfilm.

[23] Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to lead a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field.

Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, which they did.

[27] While at Pixar, Catmull was implicated in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust scandal, in which Bay Area technology companies allegedly agreed, among other things, not to cold-call recruit from one another.

[38] In 2000, Catmull was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation of digital imagery, leading to the introduction of fully synthetic visual effects and motion pictures.

In 2006, he was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann All-Medal Crown Of Trophies for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation and rendering.