Prescott Wright was raised in the Bronx, was stationed in the Army at Fort Ord, and went to Monterey Peninsula College.
In a letter to a friend dated December 1970 he wrote, "By September I had sold about $50 grand worth of films and was applying for my own iron lung.
Since it was almost impossible to see quality animation in the US at that time, Prescott became active with the group when he joined the AFI in 1969 and, having worked previously in film distribution, he was asked to head the project when they decided to show the program in other cities.
Until the Iron Curtain collapsed, ASIFA helped bridge the gap between East and West by helping animators from Eastern Europe attend festivals in the West, to visit studios in the Europe and North America, and to show their films in-person.
Pres served a year as director of the Denver International Film Festival (1980/81) and, returning to San Francisco, became the producer of "The Animators", a series of TV programs made in 1982 for KQED-TV in San Francisco which featured Bay Area talent such as Jeff Hale, Bud Luckey, Rudy Zamora, Sally Cruickshank and Marcy Page.
Organized by ASIFA-Hollywood during the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games of 1984, Prescott was involved, as Director, with the creation and management of the "Olympiad of Animation", which was shown in Los Angeles at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
These included serving as a member of the Film Arts Foundation board of directors in San Francisco from the late 1960s (and as President of the Board from 1978 to 1979), and as Treasurer of the Society for Animation Studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s (with Harvey Deneroff, the founder and first president of that association).
After Disney, he worked in both the Philippines and Southern India as an instructor and festival director for emerging animation studios.