Dana Terrace

Dana Terrace (born December 8, 1990) is an American animator and voice actress, best known as the creator of the Disney Channel animated series The Owl House.

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.

While in high school, she worked at a natural history museum for three years.

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 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.

In April 2012, during her third year at SVA, she created an animated short titled "Kickball," with voiceovers by YouTube animator Yotam 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.

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 hiring her for Disney Television Animation and landing her a job on the series as a storyboard revisionist.

In 2014, she tabled at the CTN Animation Expo with Nate Swineheart, and sold prints, sketchbooks, and other works.

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.

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.

She is also known for storyboarding on Gravity Falls and directing on the 2017 reboot of DuckTales.

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, Pokémon, 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.

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.

In 2017, Terrace directed various episodes of the 2017 DuckTales reboot 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.

The line producer for the second season of Gravity Falls was also working on DuckTales and brought her into the show in spite of Terrace having never watched the original series before working on the show, througth she is a fan of the Carl Banks/Don Rosa comic books both series draw inspiration from.

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."

In 2018, she inked 34 pages of Hirsch's graphic novel, Gravity Falls: Lost Legends: 4 All-New Adventures!

In 2019, she said she had a "wonderful experience" on Gravity Falls and said she "couldn’t have asked for a better first gig."