Rebecca Rea Sugar (born July 9, 1987) is an American animator and screenwriter. She is best known for being the creator of the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe, making her the first non-binary person to independently create a series for the network; prior to coming out as non-binary, Sugar was described as the first woman to do so. Until 2013, Sugar was a writer and storyboard artist on the animated television series Adventure Time. Her work on the two series has earned her seven Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Sugar is bisexual, non-binary, and genderqueer, using both she/her and they/them pronouns. Sugar's queerness has served as the inspiration for her to stress the importance of LGBT representation in the arts, especially in children's entertainment.
Early life
Sugar was raised in the Sligo Park Hills area of Silver Spring, Maryland. She simultaneously attended Montgomery Blair High School and the Visual Arts Center at Albert Einstein High School (where she was an arts semifinalist in the Presidential Scholar competition, and won Montgomery County's prestigious Ida F. Haimovicz Visual Arts Award), both of which are located in Maryland. While at Blair, she drew several comics (called "The Strip" for the school's newspaper, Silver Chips) which won first place for comics in the Newspaper Individual Writing and Editing Contest. "The Strip" ran a comic challenging MCPS's new grading policy from 2005. She went on to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.
According to Sugar's father Rob, Rebecca Sugar and her younger brother Steven were raised with what he called "Jewish sensibilities", and both siblings observe the lighting of Hanukkah candles with their parents via Skype.
Career
Early work
During her time at the School of Visual Arts, Sugar directed short animated films, including Johnny Noodleneck (2008). In 2009, she wrote and animated Singles, in which frequent collaborator Ian Jones-Quartey acted as an assistant animator, assistant inker and voice actor on the project, while Sugar's brother Steven Sugar acted as an assistant colorist. Sugar completed this film as her thesis.
Sugar also played an important role in the creation of nockFORCE, a cartoon series created by Ian Jones-Quartey and Jim Gisriel and launched in 2007 on YouTube. In particular, she contributed to the cartoon's backgrounds and characters.
In 2010, Sugar published her first graphic novel, Pug Davis, featuring an astronaut dog and his gay sidekick Blouse.
She is also known for her comic "Don't Cry for Me, I'm Already Dead", a story about two brothers whose shared love of The Simpsons takes a tragic turn.
Television
Sugar first joined the crew of Adventure Time as a storyboard revisionist during the show's first season. Due to the quality of her work, within a month of being hired she was promoted to a storyboard artist, making her debut during the production of the second season. Her first episode was "It Came from the Nightosphere". While working on the show, she was encouraged by the creative team to put her "own life experiences into the character of Marceline". As she put it in an interview with Paper Magazine, she connected with indie and underground comic artists who worked on the show, like Pendleton Ward, Patrick McHale and Adam Muto, who told her to do what she would do when drawing comics and to not hold anything back. She stated that some of the changes in animation for years to come were inspired by what the show was able to do by being "very artist-driven", by independent comic artists like herself.
Production for Steven Universe began while Sugar was still working on Adventure Time. She continued working on Adventure Time until the show's fifth season, whereupon she left in order to focus on Steven Universe. Her last episode for Adventure Time was "Simon & Marcy"; following that episode, working on both series simultaneously "became impossible to do". She had also previously encountered difficulty in the production of the Adventure Time episode "Bad Little Boy". Sugar returned temporarily to write the song "Everything Stays" for the seventh season miniseries Stakes, and the song "Time Adventure" for the series finale, Come Along with Me.