Dana Terrace

Dana Terrace (born December 8, 1990) is an American animator, writer, storyboard artist, director, producer and voice actress. She is best known as the creator of the Disney Channel animated series ''The Owl House''. She is also known for storyboarding on ''Gravity Falls'' and directing on the 2017 reboot of ''DuckTales''.

Early life and education

Terrace was born in Hamden, Connecticut. She spent eight years going to St. Rita School, a local Catholic School, gaining an interest in painters such as John Bauer, Remedios Varo, and Hieronymus Bosch. As a child, she watched cartoons like ''The Powerpuff Girls'', '' South Park'', and ''The Simpsons,'' inspiring her later works. Studio Ghibli films (especially ''Princess Mononoke''), the anime series ''Revolutionary Girl Utena'' and ''Garfield'' influenced her as well. In 2000, she created her first flip-book animation, which focused on "Pikachu thundershocking a Charmander." Terrace was a dancer for 10 years. She attended Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Terrace studied animation at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While there she drew for about eight hours a day, and began posting work to her Tumblr blog. In April 2012, during her third year at SVA, she created an animated short titled "Kickball," with voiceovers by Yotem Perel and music by Jeff Liu. "Kickball" was praised for its design and "expressive motion" and won a grant from the National Board of Review. The following year, she worked with Iker Maidagan on a short animated film titled "Mirage". Maidagan did the layout and wrote the story, while Terrace animated and designed the characters. The film was praised as being "flawlessly executed," was shown at the LA Shorts Fest, and resulted in Terrace and Maidagan receiving an Alumni Scholarship Award. At the time, when asked about animating, she said she loved it, and said she is on the track to become a "proper filmmaker" and stated that she would collaborate with Maidagan in the future. She later described her experience at SVA as a mixed bag, although she learned a lot from online tutorials, her peers, and fellow students.

In 2011, Terrace was an assistant for a thesis horror comedy film by Zach Bellissimo titled ''Blanderstein'', as was Terrace's roommate Luz Batista. ''Blanderstein'' went on to win a Dusty Award for "Outstanding Traditional Animation and Achievement in Traditional Animation Character Design," tying with Michael Ruocco's thesis film, ''Destiny is for the Birds''. See the list of winners in 2011 which list Blanderstein and Destiny for the Birds

Internship and early work

After graduating from SVA in 2013, she interned the following summer at JibJab, where she met an individual from ''Gravity Falls'' who saw her student film ''Mirage'' and sent her a storyboard test, subsequently landing her a job on the series as a storyboard revisionist. As she described it in 2017, she was brought into ''Gravity Falls'' because creative people working on the show liked what they saw on her Tumblr blog, and she was brought in because she was willing to do any kind of animation for a specific scene. Her work for ''Gravity Falls'' would be her "first professional animation job," where she learned to storyboard, how to handle a crew, and have a clear vision. Terrace also animated sequences for the show that were animated in-house due to being considered too important to be animated by outside studios.Animation I did from the last scene of Not What He Seems. Keys by Matt Braly. Woo
/ref> In 2019, she said she had a "wonderful experience" on ''Gravity Falls'' and said she "couldn’t have asked for a better first gig." She stated in a 2016 interview that she was waiting to hear back from ''Steven Universe'' because she was a fan of Rebecca Sugar after seeing her films at SVA, but they "took too long to reply" so she decided to work for ''Gravity Falls'' instead.

In 2014, she tabled at the CTN Animation Expo with Nate Swineheart, and sold prints, sketchbooks, and other works. In 2018, she inked 34 pages of Hirsch's graphic novel, ''Gravity Falls: Lost Legends: 4 All-New Adventures!''

Career

In 2017, Terrace directed various episodes of ''DuckTales'' and made the character Webby Vanderquack "more dynamic."
Terrace later said she wasn't feeling "fulfilled artistically or emotionally" in the job, which moved her to create her own series. Although she had never watched the series before working on the show, the line producer for the second season of ''Gravity Falls'' was also working on ''DuckTales'' and brought her into the show. The same year, ''Variety'' highlighted her as an up-and-coming animator. Also that year she worked as a storyboard revisionist for '' Tangled: Before Ever After'', directed by Tom Caulfield and Stephen Sandoval; Sandoval would later work on ''The Owl House''. She later storyboarded the fourth episode of ''Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure'', "Challenge of the Brave."

After years of working on other Disney Channel shows, Terrace developed the characters and "baseline idea" for an original series at the end of 2016 and pitched the series a few months after she started directing ''DuckTales'' in 2017. The pitch, "a young girl goes to another world and learns magic from an older witch", later developed into ''The Owl House''. The first character she created was the Owl Lady, which she based on the women in her family, including her aunts, mother, and grandmother. The character Luz Noceda is named after her roommate. The series was also influenced by ''Pokémon Red'', a game Terrace's father, Thomas Terrace, an attorney in Hamden, Connecticut, gave her before he died in a car accident when she was age 11. Terrace said she was motivated to create ''The Owl House'' to prove it was a good story, and gave it the current name because of the "mystique surrounding owls." She later said that while there is some information for fans who want to "dig deeper" into the show, like codes and ciphers in ''Gravity Falls'', there is a way to "enjoy the show as it is" without digging into the show's lore.

''The Owl House'' began development on February 23, 2018, when it was greenlit alongside ''Amphibia'', and premiered on January 10, 2020, on Disney Channel in the United States. The series was approved for a second season on November 21, 2019. The same year, Terrace illustrated an alternative cover for issue 4 of ''Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake: Card Wars'', a BOOM! Studios six-issue miniseries which featured Fionna and Cake, the gender-swapped versions of Finn and Jake. Terrace also provided guest animation for the episode of ''Adventure Time'' titled "Bad Timing". A few years later, Terrace criticized the cancellation of ''The Venture Bros.'' by Adult Swim, writing "this timeline sucks."

In 2021, the director of '' The Mitchells vs. the Machines'' Mike Rianda would reveal that Terrace had been a storyboard artist for the film. The same year, Terrace provided rough animation for ''The Owl House'' season 2 episodes "Keeping Up A-fear-ances", "Hunting Palismen", and "Eclipse Lake".

Terrace and LGBTQ+ representation in ''The Owl House''

''The Owl House'' has been praised for its depiction of an LGBTQ+ relationship between the characters of Luz Noceda and Amity Blight, for which Terrace is responsible. During its second season, the series was also lauded for the inclusion of a non-binary and presumably transgender character, in the form of Raine Whispers. She actively uses Twitter to confirm the LGBTQ+ identities of characters. Though Disney was initially resistant to the portrayal of a queer relationship on the show, Terrace eventually gained their support, crediting the change of mind to her "stubbornness".

Terrace told '' Vanity Fair'' in March 2021 that she was open about plans for Luz being bisexual and including LGBT+ characters during development of the show. She was later told that she could not "have any kind of gay storyline among the main characters." Terraces said that in response, "I let myself get mad, to absolutely blow up, and storm out of the room. Life is short and I don’t have time for cowardice, I was ready to move on to greener pastures if need be." A "week or two" later, she was "given the all-clear" and describes the studio as supportive since then.

News media such as CNN and ''Deadline'' have expressed support for these portrayals, while conservative sites like One Million Moms

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