Rebecca Sugar

Rebecca Rea Sugar is an American animator, composer and director. She is best known for creating the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe, which has made her the first woman to independently create a series for the network. Sugar was formerly a writer and storyboard artist on the animated television series Adventure Time. Her work on Adventure Time and Steven Universe have earned her three Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

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), with both schools in Maryland. She went on to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Career
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".

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 did, however, return to the Adventure Time crew temporarily to write the song "Everything Stays" for the seventh season miniseries "Stakes".

Sugar designed the album cover of True Romance for Estelle, the voice of Garnet on Steven Universe. In December 2016, comic book publisher Youth In Decline featured Sugar's sketches and story notes for her unpublished comic Margo In Bed as issue #14 of the art/comics anthology series Frontier.

Accolades
Rebecca Sugar's work on Adventure Time gained Primetime Emmy Award for Short-format Animation nominations for the episode "It Came from the Nightosphere" in 2011 and for the episode "Simon & Marcy" in 2013, as well as a 2012 Annie Award nomination for Best Storyboarding in a Television Production. In 2012, Forbes magazine included her on its "30 Under 30 in Entertainment" list, noting that she was responsible for "many of the best episodes" of Adventure Time.

For her work on Steven Universe, Sugar was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for Short-format Animation for the episodes "Lion 3: Straight to Video" and "The Answer".

Personal life
In February 2016, Ian Jones-Quartey confirmed that he and Sugar had been in a romantic relationship for the past eight years. He added that they met when Sugar was at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In July 2016, Sugar said at a San Diego Comic-Con panel that the LGBT themes in Steven Universe were in large part based on her own experience as a bisexual woman.

Her father Rob Sugar said that Rebecca and her brother Steven were raised with what he called "Jewish sensibilities". Both siblings observe the lighting of Hanukkah candles with their parents via Skype.