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Dana Terrace (born December 8, 1990) is an American animator, writer, director, and voice actress. She is best known as the creator of the Disney Channel animated series The Owl House and the co-creator of the Glitch Productions animated web series Knights of Guinevere. She is also known for her work as a storyboard artist on Gravity Falls and as a director on the 2017 reboot of DuckTales.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> here. It is not known whether Terrace is referring to Garfield the comic or the animated series, Garfield and Friends. 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 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. The exact page was never archived, only the page listing all the blog entries, hence the different url. Kickball was praised for its design and "expressive motion" and won a grant from the National Board of Review. See bottom of 2012 Winners section The following year, she worked with Iker Maidagan on another animated short titled Mirage. The exact page was never archived, only the page listing all the blog entries, hence the different url. 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. See 2013 section. 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 Comedy horror 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
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!
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 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, revealed that Terrace was 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".
In March 2023, Terrace announced on her Instagram that she had left Disney. Afterwards, co-founder of Glitch Productions Kevin Lerdwichagul contacted Terrace on social media, offering her to work for the studio, saying: "Do you want to make whatever you want?". She accepted the offer and it led to the creation of Knights of Guinevere. On January 17, 2025, it was announced that Terrace had co-created a series for Glitch Productions, titled Knights of Guinevere, alongside The Owl House writers John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus. Glitch Productions also described the series as a "sci-fi psychological thriller" and the company's first-ever 2D animated production. The Michigan Daily said that her career in Disney influenced the pilot's plot, it noted that Park Planet (fictional corporation in the pilot) shared some similarities with The Walt Disney Company. The pilot was described by Terrace, on social media, as different from The Owl House, describing it as being "much more adult oriented" and having "adult themes," such as "animated blood and gore".
The pilot premiered on September 19, 2025, with Terrace telling Animation Magazine that the series is a "passion project" and she, Zach and John created "with some of the best artists, animators, musicians and production crew we know." In the first two days following its release on September 19, the series' pilot episode received eight million views and Evan Valentine of ComicBook reported that in the five days after its release, it had garnered over ten million views. While Terrace said that the pilot reminded her of a "collaborative student film" because she and others were "passionately working together" on it, with TheWrap saying that the pilot received an "overwhelming positive response", Terrace thinks it may not become a full series.
From February 2, 2025, to March 9, 2025, Terrace had a solo art exhibit in Alhambra, California which displayed a wide array of her artwork since 2015, in order to celebrate the release of an art book entitled skin & bones and related merchandise.
Terrace told Vanity Fair in March 2021 that she was open about plans for Luz to be bisexual and include LGBT+ characters during the development of the show. She was later told that she could not "have any kind of gay storyline among the main characters." Terrace 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 have expressed the opposite, condemning Disney Channel for their inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities in the series.
Terrace came out as Bisexuality in 2017, and drew on her experiences to create The Owl House and the bisexual character Luz Noceda. Terrace has mentioned multiple times that she draws inspiration for Luz Noceda from herself. In 2025 she stated that the bisexual label no longer feels accurate to her, and she is comfortable being referred to as just queer.
In 2018, Terrace signed a petition supporting pay equity in the animation industry. In 2022, she joined other animators at Disney who criticized Bob Chapek's refusal to make a comment on HB 1557, which is often referred to as the "Don't Say Gay" bill. She also argued that Chapek's letter to employees was "flowery and compassionate words to shut you up."
In November 2024, Terrace responded to the reported shelving of an episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, focusing on a transgender character, by Disney, saying that the company is "terrified of everything" and adding that Disney should "grow some fuckin guts."
In November 2025, after Disney announced a feature allowing subscribers to "create their own AI-generated content within the app," Terrace encouraged fans of The Owl House to unsubscribe from Disney+ and Online piracy the series. She called Bob Iger and other executives "fucking ghouls", and expressed her hatred of GenAI, its environmental impacts, and its supporters, saying that regular people create "movies and art" every day without those tools, using "pens, pencils, and styluses" instead.
Terrace and LGBTQ+ representation in The Owl House
The Owl House has been praised for its depiction of an LGBTQ people 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 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".
Personal life
From 2015 to sometime before April 2022, Terrace was in a relationship with Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch.
Filmography
Film
Television
Storyboard artist (2015–16) In-house animator Additional animator
Web series
Nominations and awards
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! scope="row" style="text-align:center;" | 2018
| Daytime Emmy Award
| Outstanding Special Class Animated Program
| DuckTales (for "Woo-oo!")
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! scope="row" rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;" | 2021
| GLAAD Media Award
| GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming
| rowspan="5"| The Owl House
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| Peabody Awards
| Children's & Youth Programming
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| Daytime Emmys
| Outstanding Main Title for a Daytime Animated Program
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! scope="row" style="text-align:center;"| 2022
| GLAAD Media Award
| GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming
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| GLAAD Media Awards Nominations: HBO/HBO Max Leads With 19; Netflix Close Behind
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! scope="row" style="text-align:center;"| 2023
| GLAAD Media Award
| GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming
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Notes
External links
Categories: 1990 Births, 21st-century American Lgbtq People, 21st-century American Women, Activists From Connecticut, American Feminists, American Lgbtq Rights Activists, American Lgbtq Screenwriters, American Queer Actresses, American Queer Artists, American Queer Writers, American Storyboard Artists, American Women Human Rights Activists, Critics Of Artificial Intelligence, Disney Television Animation People, Lgbtq Animators, Lgbtq People From Connecticut, Lgbtq Television Directors, Living People, People From Hamden, Connecticut, Queer Feminists, Queer Screenwriters, School Of Visual Arts Alumni, Showrunners Of Animated Series, Animators From Connecticut
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