ND Stevenson

• 1. Introduction

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  ND Stevenson was born on the 31st of December 1991, in Columbia, South Carolina, into a family he would later describe as "very religious." That upbringing shaped almost everything that followed, sometimes by giving him a framework to work within and sometimes by giving him one to push against.

  At age 5 or 6, his first brush with animation came from a church library. The series was Superbook, an anime adaptation of biblical stories. He found it "really scary...and a little bit traumatizing." He would later joke that it sounded like "the Bible edition of Drifters." That uneasy fascination with stories that mixed the sacred and the strange would leave a mark.

  The questions this documentary will explore are not just about a prolific cartoonist and showrunner. They are about what it means to build a public career while privately searching for a name, a pronoun, and a self. They are about a webcomic that began as a class assignment and ended up at Netflix. And they are about a person who described his most celebrated job as the "most intensive" of his life, and who felt genuine relief when it was over.

• 2. A Scheduling Accident

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  Stevenson was homeschooled before attending A.C. Flora High School, where during his senior year he created picture books and won a local award in the Visual Literacy Book Production category. A public school teacher noticed his drive and made sure he met representatives from art schools, including one from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Something about that city, Stevenson said, "felt right."

  He enrolled at MICA with the goal of becoming a children's book illustrator. What changed that path was not ambition but accident. A scheduling conflict pushed him into a comics class he had not planned on taking. That class became the birthplace of Nimona.

  While at MICA, Stevenson also built a following online under the name "gingerhaze" for a series of "hipster Lord of the Rings" characters. Scholarships made the education financially possible, and he later credited them explicitly. He graduated in 2013, but the most important work of his student years had already begun a year earlier.

• 3. Nimona's Origin

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  During his junior year at MICA, Stevenson created the character Nimona as part of a class assignment. By mid-2012, that single character had grown into a webcomic he was posting online. A literary agent discovered it there and helped him sign with HarperCollins to publish an expanded graphic novel version.

  Nimona also served as Stevenson's senior thesis in 2012. Slate Magazine named it the best web comic of the year in its 2012 Cartoonist Studio Prize. The published graphic novel was named a 2015 National Book Award Finalist and won the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: Reprint.

  Stevenson later said that the ability to create Nimona independently was what got him his first "writing job in animation." While still in school he was doing freelance illustration work for Random House and St. Martin's Press. In the summer of 2012 he interned at BOOM! Studios in Los Angeles, and the following year he created the cover art for Rainbow Rowell's novel Fangirl and contributed to Ryan North's choose-your-own-adventure book To Be or Not to Be, based on Hamlet. Nimona the animated film would arrive years later, with directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, and Stevenson worked to ensure the character remained at the "heart of the story" rather than treated as an "accessory."

• 4. Lumberjanes and She-Ra

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  After graduating in 2013, Stevenson returned to BOOM! Studios to help develop Lumberjanes, a comic series he co-wrote. The series won Eisner Awards for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens in 2015. An animated adaptation was in development for HBO Max, with Stevenson announced as executive producer and writer, though by September 2025 he confirmed the project had stalled due to issues including corporate mergers, describing it as "sort of on ice" but "a long way from dead." He mentioned the possibility of a stage musical or an RPG.

  In 2015 Stevenson also wrote for Marvel Comics on Thor Annual and Runaways, and joined the writing team of Disney's Wander Over Yonder at the start of its second season. Two years later he appeared in two episodes of Critical Role's first campaign as a character named Tova.

  The centerpiece of this period was She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the rebooted DreamWorks Animation series for Netflix. Stevenson was its creator, showrunner, and executive producer. It ran for five seasons from 2018 to 2020. Critics praised its diverse cast and the intricate relationship between She-Ra and her former best friend turned archenemy, Catra. In 2019 the show was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and a Daytime Emmy at the 46th Daytime Emmy Awards. In 2021 it won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming, tied with First Day.

  Stevenson said in a 2023 interview that he started playing Dungeons and Dragons when developing She-Ra, and that his Tiefling warlock character directly inspired Glimmer's teleportation powers and her habit of acting without much forethought. He called the show the "most intensive job" of his life. When it ended, he said, he "literally had nothing to do for the first time in my life."

• 5. Finding a Name

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  In July 2020, Stevenson publicly announced that he was "nonbinary, or something like it," and that he used any gender pronouns. That November he published a comic about his top surgery. On the 31st of March 2021, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, he stated that he is transmasculine and bigender.

  The question of a name took longer. In August 2021 he changed his first name to ND. Two months later he acknowledged being "increasingly aware of the practical need for a new, less gendered name" while admitting he did not yet feel he had one. On the 30th of June 2022, he announced the name Nate, which he had already been using privately since 2021, and clarified that he accepts the nickname "Indy."

  In October 2020, for Oprah Magazine's National Coming Out Day feature, Stevenson wrote and illustrated his own coming-out story. He described his path to self-acceptance and what he called his "battle against the gender essentialism of his Evangelical upbringing," noting that he had become an atheist by age 23. His newsletter, launched in October 2021 under the title "I'm Fine I'm Fine Just Understand," carries on this autobiographical thread, exploring mental health, gender identity, and personal essays. Premium subscribers receive comics addressing more personal or sensitive topics. The newsletter was nominated for a Digital Book of the Year Harvey Award in August 2022.

  His marriage to fellow cartoonist Lee Knox Ostertag in September 2019 runs through much of this period. He began dating Ostertag at the same time he started developing She-Ra, and described Ostertag as influential on the show "from the very beginning." Ostertag originated a major plot twist in the show's penultimate season.

• 6. Shapeshifters and New Work

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  On the 4th of February 2022, Stevenson posted a fan comic based on The Book of Boba Fett, titled "This Place Was Home," on Twitter. The comic drew positive attention and was later added to his newsletter. It centered on Boba Fett's childhood relationship with the shapeshifting character Zam Wesell, and Stevenson explained that as a young viewer, Wesell had made a deep impression on him. He latched onto her because she was a shapeshifter, and he built out an entire parallel story in his imagination where she survived and became the main character.

  His interest in shapeshifters extends across his body of work. He named Carrie Kelley in the Batman comics as another figure he was drawn to. He also noted that Double Trouble in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was intended as a direct homage to Wesell.

  On the prose fiction side, Stevenson announced in February 2025 that his two-book novel series, Scarlet Morning, would be published by HarperCollins. The first volume arrived in September 2025. The project originated as a story he wrote at age 12, influenced by Christopher Paolini's Eragon, and originally ran to 600 pages. He described it as queer and involving pirates. The first library cards he designed for public circulation debuted at a festival in March 2026, when Richland Library released them as collectibles for National Library Week. By the 22nd of April 1,100 of those cards had been activated by patrons either online or in person.