Teri Hendrich Cusumano: Animation Labor Pioneer Turned Fine Art Painter
She fought for eight years to close animation's gender pay gap. Then she lost everything that defined her. A Stories of Resilience profile.
After 17 years of painting the worlds of animated television and fighting to close a gender pay gap rooted in the 1930s, Teri Hendrich Cusumano lost her job, her union role, and the identity she had built around both. What remained was a garage art studio in Glendale with vibrant canvases of magenta and blue lining every wall, and a question she’d never had to answer before: who am I without all of that?
Teri Hendrich Cusumano found me through The Animation Guild Discord, where I’d shared information about this project. Her submission stood out immediately, and not just for the breadth of her career, but also for the specificity of what she had lost. She described experiencing an “ego death,” a term that carries weight far beyond her professional setback. In her case, it meant the simultaneous collapse of the two identities she had spent years building: accomplished color supervisor and pioneering labor advocate.
It was one of the hottest spring days on record in Los Angeles County when I drove out to visit Teri at her home in Glendale. The walk from my car to her garage was short but sweltering, the kind of dry, unforgiving heat that makes you reconsider if this was still a good idea. Then I stepped inside, and everything changed. The air conditioning hit first, and then the color, those magentas, blues, purples, and cool greens surrounding me from every direction in her garage art corner. Completed canvases hung on the walls. Color studies were pinned up near her worktable. Paints were organized meticulously on shelves alongside archived prints and works in progress. It was a space that radiated a joyful, vibrant calm, the kind of creative sanctuary that you don’t want to leave. Standing in that garage, I could see she had already started building what comes next.
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Teri grew up in Glendora, a working-class city in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Art was present in her childhood, but not celebrated as a career path. “My parents didn’t discourage me or anything,” she recalls, “but it wasn’t something they were necessarily promoting.” She was a quiet child, and drawing became her primary language. “I can talk just by drawing,” she says, describing the impulse that would eventually carry her through two decades of professional creative work and into a new life as an independent painter.
She attended ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where she studied illustration with a focus on editorial work, which is the kind of evocative, interpretive portraiture you’d find accompanying a profile in a major magazine. “I really loved seeing the editorial images in magazines,” she explains. “Some celebrity that was interviewed, and an illustrator did their image. I was like, oh, that sounds fun.” She had no exposure to animation as a discipline. “I had no idea at all what animation involved. Which is funny that it’s right here, the industry, and I was just not exposed to it at all.”
After graduating in 2004, Teri made the pilgrimage to New York, like so many young illustrators, to meet art directors and hand out cards. Reality set in quickly. “Even if they love my work, it depends on whether they have the right project,” she realized. She took a job in architectural illustration, followed by design work at a novelty giftware company in Covina, a small city east of Los Angeles. Both paid barely above minimum wage.
The pivot to animation came through a phone call that wasn’t even meant for her. A former ArtCenter classmate called, looking for someone else’s number, mentioning that an animated pilot had been picked up for a full season and the production needed artists. “If it pays well, I’ll apply too,” Teri told her. She got the job and found herself earning roughly three times what her previous positions had paid.
That first show was unconventional, non-union, with no segmented roles. Every artist did everything: characters, backgrounds, color, and poses. “Some people might hear that and be like, oh, that sounds abusive,” Teri acknowledges. “But for me, it was the first time learning there are all these jobs or possibilities in animation.” The experience helped her discover where her instincts led, toward backgrounds and, increasingly, toward color.
“I was a very quiet child. And so to me, I’m like, oh, I can talk just by drawing.”
By 2011, she had landed at Titmouse, one of the most prolific independent animation studios in Los Angeles. She was hired as a background designer and painter, but the art director noticed something. “I think you’re maybe better at color,” they told her, and by the next season, her role had shifted to background paint exclusively. It was at Titmouse that she met her husband, Jack Cusumano, who worked in the same department doing design and color work. She would go on to work across multiple television series over the following years, eventually rising to Color Supervisor at Bento Box Entertainment, where she oversaw the color departments on shows including Duncanville and Krapopolis for Fox.
All the while, Teri maintained a personal painting practice on the side, showing in galleries around Los Angeles, but she always kept a deliberate separation between her professional work and her artistic identity. “I was kind of detached from it,” she admits, describing what it felt like to see her shows on television. “Animation, it’s like I’m being asked to work in a specific style that might not even intuitively be what I would want to do. I didn’t view it as a personal kind of triumph or anything.” The feeling was more pragmatic than personal. “I was very conscious of, okay, I’m kind of like a hired hand, executing someone’s vision. But I didn’t really feel like anyone was going to pay me for my vision.”
When asked what color does in a story that other elements cannot, Teri’s answer reveals the depth of craft beneath the job title. “It has its own narrative,” she says. “Even as simple as the color of a character’s shirt. If it’s this pure white color, that says something about the character, versus if it’s this muddy gray. There are subtle emotional or character cues that can be conveyed through color.” For 2D animation, she notes, the color department also functions as the lighting department, controlling time of day, atmosphere, and the way light interacts with every surface on screen.
[As a lighting artist myself in feature animation, this intersection of color and light is where much of my own career has been spent over the years, a shared language that made our conversation feel especially grounded.]
The personal work and the professional advocacy would also eventually converge through injustice.
In 2016, Teri’s daughter was born. The following year, while working at ShadowMachine in Los Angeles, both she and her husband were offered positions on the same production: Teri as a background painter, Jack as a color designer. The rates seemed low, so she called The Animation Guild to check. Her rate, they confirmed, was incorrect for a background painter. His, however, was correct for a color designer.
“That blew my mind,” she recalls, “because all my experience had been in design and I just assumed everyone was getting at least a similar minimum rate.” But when she dug into The Animation Guild’s master agreement with the studios, which is the union contract that sets minimum pay rates for each job classification, the reality was stark: every design role was paid at the same minimum except color design. The difference amounted to roughly $300 per week.
What followed was one of the most significant labor advocacy campaigns in modern animation history, though it would take nearly eight years to reach its conclusion.
Teri traced the pay disparity to its roots in the industry’s earliest decades. In animation’s analog era, the Ink and Paint department was responsible for producing the thousands of hand-inked and hand-painted celluloid sheets, known as cels, required to make animated images appear to move on screen. It was painstaking, labor-intensive work that demanded a massive workforce. Studios, seeking to keep their largest department’s costs low, staffed it almost exclusively with women and paid them accordingly. At Walt Disney Studios, the Ink and Paint department was physically segregated in its own building, and women were explicitly prohibited from other animation work, a policy documented in a 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions confirming that “the only work open to women” dealt with inking and painting cels. At its peak, the department comprised over half of The Animation Guild’s voting membership.
As technology transformed the industry, with cel Xeroxing appearing in the late 1950s1, the outsourcing of Ink and Paint work abroad in the late 1970s and 1980s2, and the digital revolution of the 1990s, the physical department disappeared. But the roles that descended directly from it, such as Color Design and Animation Checking, survived the transition and remained female-dominated. Storyboard Revision, a more recently established role that also employs predominantly women, carried a similar pay disparity. All three classifications shared the same union minimum rate, and none had ever been corrected to match equivalent, male-dominated roles.
Around the same time Teri was uncovering this pattern, she came across Mindy Johnson’s book Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation, which documented this history in detail. “Just hearing the title, I was like, oh, I think that’s it,” she recalls. “That’s the reason. But no one at that time was talking about it or connected to it.”3
In 2018, Teri helped form the Color Designer Committee within The Animation Guild and launched the #ColorIsDesign campaign, gathering over 2,000 signatures from industry professionals and presenting directly to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) during contract negotiations. She prepared with the thoroughness of someone building a legal case, assembling a detailed presentation with historical evidence and pay data. “I’m thinking, these are all lawyers,” she says. “So I made this case as if it were a court presentation, with all my evidence laid out.”
But she quickly learned the limits of moral clarity in a negotiation room. “Within union negotiations, everything’s on the record,” she explains. “So if I’m going to them, saying, you’re partaking in gender pay discrimination, they will not want to admit that on the record. So I had to start thinking, how do you fight an argument that can’t be said outright?”
“How do you fight an argument that can’t be said outright?”
That first round of negotiations yielded only modest changes, a title change from “Color Stylist” to “Color Designer” and a shortened wage schedule. Teri was heartbroken. “We did all this work, and that’s it?” But seasoned negotiators on the committee reassured her: in a process where gains are measured in increments over three-year cycles, any change at all was significant. The 2022 contract closed the pay gap by a third and added a supervisor premium. Then, in August 2024, a landmark pay equity study conducted jointly by The Animation Guild, IATSE, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Labor Center provided, for the first time, objective data. The researchers used a formal job evaluation tool and concluded that color design work was “substantially similar” to other design classifications, and was being underpaid.
“All along the argument, it was an opinion that this work was equal,” Teri explains. “Everyone could then just say, I don’t believe you. This study coming out was like, no, now we have a third-party university saying this is an objective fact.”
The final round of negotiations, completed in late 2024, secured the commitment that would close the gap for good. Under the new contract, color designers would be moved into the same wage classification as other design roles, with increases phased in over the agreement’s three-year term. Across three contracts and nearly eight years of sustained advocacy, the structural pay disparity, rooted in the gendered labor practices of 1930s Hollywood, had finally been addressed for this craft.
Teri’s advocacy work had expanded far beyond the pay equity fight. In 2022, she earned a Certificate in Labor Studies from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, specifically to make herself a credible candidate for full-time union work. That same year, she was elected Vice President of The Animation Guild.
Her tenure coincided with some of the most turbulent years in Hollywood’s recent history. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes shut down much of the industry. Animation production contracted sharply. A huge number of guild members faced unemployment. As VP, Teri found herself navigating the tension between institutional solidarity and the personal desperation of members who were losing their jobs and going on public assistance.
The final contract negotiations in late 2024 were especially difficult. A large contingent of members, many of them unemployed, had joined the bargaining process, partly driven by organized outreach on social media. The structure of the negotiations created its own friction: some committee members were present at the table in person, while others participated remotely with limited voting ability, a setup designed to accommodate broader participation but one that inadvertently created a two-tier dynamic. Members who were out of work and struggling financially found themselves watching others carry out the day-to-day labor of bargaining, and the gap between those two experiences produced real tension. “There would just be these things that they point out, like the struggles they were going through,” Teri recalls.
But what came next was harder.
In October 2024, Teri’s position as Color Supervisor on Krapopolis came to an end. The show itself continued, and it remains in production today, but she was told the production no longer had the budget for her role. Over the course of its three seasons, the show had been incrementally outsourcing positions, and by that point, much of the work was being done outside of Los Angeles. Within weeks, Teri was also back at the negotiating table for the final round of contract bargaining. A tentative agreement was reached in November and ratified by the membership in December. By February 2025, The Animation Guild had opened a new field representative position, which was the kind of full-time union role Teri had been preparing for since earning her Cornell certificate.
She applied, interviewed, and felt confident.
She didn’t get it. The position went to another executive board member, someone she knew had not pursued the same level of formal education in labor studies. “It was a slap in the face,” she says. In April 2025, she resigned from the guild’s executive board.
That same month, her unemployment benefits ran out for the first time in her entire career. Her home was under construction, with an addition that had been permitted and greenlit at the worst possible moment, and her family had temporarily relocated to a rental apartment in North Hollywood.
“All these years I was a color supervisor, and I was a union advocate, and now I’m none of those things,” Teri reflects. “So, what am I?”
“I was a color supervisor, and I was a union advocate, and now I’m none of those things. So, what am I?”
She started seeing a therapist. She stopped reading the guild’s emails and unfollowed their social media. “I had to give myself the space, so that I could find what I am now,” she says. Her children, ages six and ten, were too young to understand the full weight of what she was carrying. Her husband saw it. But much of it, she carried quietly.
Fortunately, the garage art studio in Glendale had been waiting for years.
Teri and her family moved into the house around the time her first child was born in 2016. The garage was a cluttered storage space for years. In 2020, just before the pandemic, they finally organized it into a workspace. “I was like, oh, now I can finally paint,” she recalls. “But then COVID hit, and I had to put my work computer here.” She describes the resentment of sitting in a space she’d created for her own art, surrounded by canvases, doing someone else’s work on someone else’s schedule.
When I asked Teri if she remembered the first piece she created in this space, something shifted. She got up with a kind of beaming energy, went to a shelf in the corner, and carefully unwrapped a framed canvas from its protective plastic. It was the first painting she made in this space, a figure in flowing blues and greens, surrounded by petal-like shapes against a bright sky-blue ground. It felt lyrical, almost weightless. It marked a departure from her earlier work, which she describes as more muted and controlled. “I was really envious of artists who could be more expressive and loose,” she says. “I’m very detailed and tight. So I’m like, okay, how can I find something that works for me?” She was visibly proud of it, the kind of quiet joy that comes from holding proof that you’ve changed.
The answer came through abstraction and, also unexpectedly, through astrology.
Teri’s husband was the one who initially got into astrology, taking professional coursework that reframed it far beyond the sun-sign horoscopes most people encounter casually. Intrigued, Teri began studying it herself, eventually connecting her astrological chart to her painting practice. The “Venus in the 12th” series, which became a body of work she is particularly proud of, is a collection of large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas and is named for the placement of Venus in the 12th house of her natal chart.
“The 12th house is this kind of liminal, mysterious place,” she explains. “It can be one’s blind spot. A place where you can easily be overlooked.” She pauses. “I struggle a lot with being able to describe myself or objectively knowing how I come off to people. I feel like I’m in the dark about what people think of me. And that’s the 12th house.”
For the series, she gave herself over a year of preparation, signing up for a solo show at Gallery 839, The Animation Guild’s exhibition space in Burbank, with a February 2024 opening. She approached astrology with the same rigor she’d brought to her labor advocacy, signing up for formal coursework because, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to be a poser.” The resulting paintings feature shadowed, unidentifiable figures rendered with gestural, multi-colored strokes. One, called Reunion, depicts her vision of the 12th house itself, and it earned an award from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. She self-published a 52-page catalog for the show, choosing Reunion as the cover, which the printing company was so taken with that they asked to keep extra copies to show prospective clients.
But none of the paintings sold at the exhibition. “I was still thinking, okay, I don’t see how I could ever make a living doing this,” she admits.
The shift began, improbably, with a sales and marketing course.
In the summer of 2025, at her lowest point professionally and emotionally, Teri enrolled in a coaching program specifically designed for visual artists. She had been posting her work on social media with little traction, and she figured sales and marketing were the missing skills. “I know nothing about how to sell anything to people,” she reasoned. “What else am I doing?”
The results were slow. Other participants in the group were making significant sales almost immediately. Teri would see a $50 print order come in, and that would be all she made for an entire month. Meanwhile, she continued applying to animation jobs. Nothing materialized.
Months passed. Neither path seemed to be opening, not the art, not the animation. “It did feel like, oh man, is this ever gonna change?” she recalls.
Then, in December 2025, her social media posts began reaching a wider audience. Print orders from her website ticked up. And in January of 2026, a collector discovered her work, fell in love with it, and purchased three paintings, two of them large-scale pieces from the Venus in the 12th series.
“What I brought in from my art that month matched what I would make in animation,” Teri says.
It was, by any measure, a breakthrough. But she’s honest about what followed. “Since then, trying to keep that momentum is difficult,” she says. She recently began working with an art agent who specializes in helping artists build a sustainable studio practice, the kind of structured guidance that she’s accustomed to from production environments but has never had for her own work. “Coming from animation, it’s like, here are your assignments, here’s the schedule. No one’s telling me that here.”
“What I brought in from my art that month matched what I would make in animation.”
Teri’s relationship with the animation industry remains unresolved, and she’s not pretending otherwise. When I ask if she’d return for the right show, her answer is practical, not sentimental: she’s 400 qualifying union hours short of an enhanced retirement medical benefit, and she’d like to reach that threshold. Beyond that, she’s not optimistic about the industry’s trajectory. She draws on the history she knows so well, noting that when the Ink and Paint department’s work was outsourced abroad in the 1980s, it never came back. “I’m wondering, how’s it gonna come back now?”
She also recounts a conversation with a studio head about California's tax incentive structure, which excludes key above-the-line costs from credit calculations and, until mid-2025, barred animated productions entirely. The math, the executive explained, simply doesn't work for the small and mid-budget animated productions that make up the majority of the industry's output, the very shows that once sustained thousands of jobs in Los Angeles. "It was just more writing on the wall," Teri says.
When I ask what she’d tell her daughter if she wanted to pursue animation, Teri doesn’t hesitate. “Be open to the fact that she might have to relocate to a different country,” she says. She mentions a college student studying animation in England who recently reached out for career advice. “I’d be like, stay in England. Don’t come back here.”
There is a thread that runs through all of it: the ArtCenter education, the Ink and Paint research, the #ColorIsDesign campaign, the paintings that now lean against the walls of this garage in Glendale. At every stage of her career, Teri Hendrich Cusumano has been asking the same question: what is the value of color?
For eight years, she asked it on behalf of an entire profession, and the answer she fought for changed the terms of employment for every color designer in the industry. Now, she’s asking it on her own behalf, whether the color that comes from her own hand, driven by her own vision, can sustain a family and a life.
The answer, she’s finding, is yes. Tentatively, imperfectly, but also genuinely.
“I felt like I was in a fantasy,” she says about the January that changed everything. “Like, people are gonna pay me for stuff that just comes out of my head, and I’m gonna have fun? That sounds crazy. But it happened.”
When I ask what finally brought the ground back under her feet, she pauses. “Maybe just this year,” she says. “Like, January.” She smiles.
She’s not done figuring it out. The art agents are new. The commission work is arriving but is not yet steady. Animation remains a possibility, if only for those remaining union hours. But for the first time, the path she’s on is entirely hers, not a studio’s, not a union’s, not an industry’s.
I stepped back out into the heat. After almost two hours in the cool shelter of Teri’s studio, the sun hit like a sudden and intense reminder of one of the hottest spring days Los Angeles had seen in years. Inside, everything had felt still and possible, a quiet space built around color and imagination and the unhurried work of reinvention and resilience. Out here, in the heat of a sunny Friday afternoon, none of it was visible. Just one of many residential streets in Glendale, baking under an unforgiving sun. You’d never know what was being built behind that door.
Inside that garage, an artist was making something new. And in the quiet of that space, the color still speaks.
Teri’s work can be found at terihc.art. Follow her on Instagram at terihendrich.c.
If you found Teri’s story compelling, please consider sharing this piece with others. I’m actively seeking more voices, people navigating career disruption, displacement, reinvention, or any significant life transition in Los Angeles. Reach out via my website if you, or anyone you know, might be interested in joining this project.
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For more on the xerographic process and how it transformed Disney’s animation pipeline, see “How ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ Saved Disney,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 2021).
For a detailed account of how animation outsourcing developed and its impact on domestic workers, see “A Brief History of Animation Outsourcing,” Animation Obsessive (June 2024). The Animation Guild’s own history notes that after a 1982 strike, “virtually all TV animation and ink-and-paint was sent overseas.” See “The ’50s through the ’90s,” Animation Guild.
For a comprehensive account of the Ink and Paint department’s history and the role women played in animation’s development, see Mindy Johnson, Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation (2017); and Teri Hendrich Cusumano, “Beneath the Layers of Ink and Paint: Uncovering Gender Pay Bias in Animation” (Medium, April 2, 2019).