The camera that let a Disneyland guest feel surrounded by the American West, rather than merely watching it flicker past on a flat screen, was built by a young technician who spent the next four decades chasing that same sensation into bigger and stranger machines. Don Iwerks, the Disney camera and projection engineer who built the studio's original Circle-Vision system and later co-founded Iwerks Entertainment, died on July 9, 2026, at the age of 96, The Walt Disney Company said in a statement.

Iwerks was born Donald Warren Iwerks on July 24, 1929, in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in Southern California, the eldest son of animator and special-effects innovator Ub Iwerks. He forwent a college degree, joining Walt Disney Productions in 1950 as a technician in the special photographic processes laboratory. Two years of Korean War service with the Army Signal Photo Corps interrupted that start; he returned in January 1953 to the Studio Machine Shop, where he trained as a camera technician and took his first major assignment, on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the following year.

Within the Machine Shop, Iwerks helped design the 360-degree Circle-Vision camera system that filmed Circarama, U.S.A., the multi-screen attraction that greeted Disneyland's first guests when the park opened in 1955. Its debut travelogue, A Tour of the West, ran from a rig of eleven separate 16mm projectors before later versions were trimmed to nine. He and his father then adapted a sodium vapor traveling matte process that let painted backgrounds, animation and live actors share the same frame in Mary Poppins, work that earned the studio a special Scientific or Technical Academy Award in 1964. The Circle-Vision travelogue America the Beautiful, built on his camera rig, ran at Disneyland for more than seventeen years and later played at the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris.

By the time EPCOT opened in 1982, Iwerks was designing entire theaters around the same idea: two nine-screen Circle-Vision houses, the five-screen, 200-degree wraparound stage built for Impressions de France, and the rear-projection hall behind The American Adventure. "In my career, EPCOT was most outstanding," he said. "It remains one of the most powerful experiences at EPCOT." He went on to build the in-theater 3D camera system for Captain EO in 1986 and the projection system for Star Tours the following year, having risen over 35 years from the Machine Shop floor to lead Disney's Technical Engineering and Manufacturing Division.

In 1986, Iwerks left Disney to co-found Iwerks Entertainment with fellow former Disney executive Stan Kinsey, building giant-screen theaters and 3D motion-simulator attractions that reached nearly 300 venues in 38 countries. "The creative atmosphere was created mostly by Stan when discussing venues, new shows, new ideas to entertain," Iwerks said of the partnership. "My contributions were more along the line of how we might accomplish these new ideas from a technical point of view." Kinsey put it more simply, telling InPark Magazine: "I couldn't have had a better partner." SimEx, Inc. acquired the company in 2001.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Iwerks its Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1997 for his large-format and simulated-film innovations, and the Themed Entertainment Association later gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award for the same body of work. D23, the official Disney fan club, made him a Disney Legend at its inaugural Expo in 2009, enshrining his handprints beside his father's at Legends Plaza on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank. The two men share a window above Main Street, U.S.A., at the Magic Kingdom honoring their stereoscopic camera work. "There was a 'can-do' attitude I learned from Walt and my father," Iwerks said. "If you're doing a really first-class job, you don't need to worry about the money. It will come." In 2007 he helped restore historic Disney camera equipment for The Walt Disney Family Museum, and in 2019 he published Walt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: The Genius of Ub Iwerks, a biography of the father whose habits of invention he had spent a career extending.

Iwerks was married to his wife, Betty, for 54 years. He is survived by sons John and Larry and by daughter Leslie Iwerks, an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker recognized for Recycled Life who has since made her own films about Disney's history, including The Imagineering Story; a daughter, Tamara, preceded him in death. "Don embodied that rare combination of heart, ingenuity, and passion that has always defined Disney," said Josh D'Amaro, chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, in the company's tribute. "Through his innovative contributions to some of our most iconic films and attractions, he helped create experiences that have delighted generations of fans around the world."

The machines Iwerks built carried his work far past the Machine Shop where he started. Circle-Vision cameras built on his design shot theme-park travelogues on multiple continents, the giant-screen and simulator technology he commercialized after Disney reached hundreds of venues worldwide, and the wraparound theaters he engineered for EPCOT entertained generations of guests. His handprints remain pressed in bronze beside his father's on the Burbank studio lot where he spent 35 years turning a technician's toolkit into an art form, evidence that the family's gift for showing audiences something they had never seen ran in more than one generation.