Cherrie Wang has spent her entire life doodling on anything she could get her hands on, as well as gobbling up shows, cartoons and movies. Quiet and shy, she could barely look anyone in the eye, preferring instead to bury herself in the pages of graphic novels.

Summers were spent at her grandparent’s home in sunny Los Angeles, where there was just one golden rule: in order to watch cartoons or to play or to draw, she first had to finish a large daily allocation of math and science workbook pages everyday. She’d power through them as fast as she could, and spend the rest of the hours drafting imaginary worlds and her own original comics, watching shows and imagining her own characters one day animated.

When it came time to apply to college, Cherrie faced the facts. Her family valued scientific sensibilities over silly drawings and didn’t understand the world of art and animation. They urged for stability and security. Despite struggling her way through more supplemental math and physics classes than you can imagine, she applied and made it into USC Viterbi School of Engineering.  After an ungodly amount of suffering, last-night cramming, and way too many mental breakdowns to count, Cherrie graduated with an engineering and computer science degree—to the absolute astonishment of her friends and family (especially her mother, who had called her every week of undergrad asking if she’d failed out yet).

Putting her technical skills to good use, she developed data visualizations for NASA, joined the Google APM program, led new projects on Google Maps and launched YouTube VR on the newest headsets. Getting to work alongside incredibly talented and hard-working peers inspired her to look inside of herself and pursue her own passions.

At the beginning of 2020, Cherrie made it her New Year’s resolution to figure out what was next. “If not tech, then what?” she wondered as she investigated a wide spectrum of new career paths—from music production to stand up comedy, she even considered going to law school (a classic career crisis moment).

While living and working in Tokyo, she was immersed in the world of Japanese visual arts, which inspired her to revisit her long-lost love of storytelling. Cherrie signed up for an online storyboarding class and it was love at first sight. She couldn’t believe there was a job that so perfectly combined her passion for the visual arts and storytelling! From there she was determined to make the switch into animation. She watched movies, studied cinematography, sketched people non-stop on the trains. Every hour that she wasn’t working, she was drawing.

In 2021 Cherrie left her engineering career behind to pursue animation. She got her first opportunity working full-time on an animated show at Pure Imagination Studios, and at the end of the year, got selected for the Nick Artist Program! She’s beyond excited to continue growing as an artist and to work with such an incredible group of individuals.