Stevenson attended the Maryland Institute College of Art. During her junior year, she created her soon-to-be popular character Nimona as part of an assignment in one of her classes. In summer 2012, Stevenson began creating a webcomic around the character, and soon signed with a literary agent who found the webcomic online. Nimona's adventurous story would later double as Stevenson's senior thesis in 2012.
Career
Comics and cartoons
While attending MICA, Stevenson gained fame as a fan artist, under the name "gingerhaze", for her "hipster Lord of the Rings" characters. She also created cover art for Rainbow Rowell's novel Fangirl. In the summer of 2012, Stevenson interned at BOOM! Studios, a comic publishing house in Los Angeles. After her graduation from MICA in 2013, Stevenson returned to BOOM! to help develop, and eventually write, Lumberjanes. Lumberjanes was recognized as Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens in the 2015 Eisner Awards. Besides Lumberjanes, Stevenson also gained fame as the creator of Nimona, a webcomic about a supervillain's shape-shifting sidekick. In 2012, soon after posting the first few installments of Nimona online, Stevenson signed with a literary agent who helped Stevenson sign with HarperCollins to publish Nimona as a graphic novel. For her work on Nimona, Stevenson won Slate Magazine's 2012 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Web Comic of the Year and the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: Reprint. Stevenson was also named a 2015 National Book Award Finalist for the graphic novel version of Nimona. Since 2015, she worked as a writer for Marvel Comics on the comics Thor Annual and Runaways.
Animation
Stevenson was part of the writing team of Disney's animated TV seriesWander Over Yonder, beginning with Season 2 in 2015. Stevenson also served as creator and executive producer of DreamWorks Animation Television's rebooted She-Ra and the Princesses of Power animated television series on Netflix, the first season of which was released on 13 November 2018. Its fifth and final season was released on May 15, 2020.
Other work
Stevenson did freelance illustration for Random House, St. Martin's Press, and Label Magazine. She also worked with Ryan North on his Kickstarter-funded book To Be or Not to Be, a choose-your-own-adventure-book based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Their autobiographical collection of drawings and journals, The Fire Never Goes Out, was published in March 2020. The New Yorker's review described it as "a memoir of sorts, a coming-out story, a love story, a tale of disorientingly rapid professional triumph, and a story about mental health and illness, showing the young artist figuring out what she must do—first to make art and then to get well."
