Stephanie Yuhas is a writer and producer who, having traversed the trenches of Hollywood, continues to create award-winning comedic content for giants like HBO Max, Netflix, and Amazon Studios. In the face of technological disruption—AI will take all our jobs, we need to upskill or get left behind, and the like—maintaining professional optimism can be challenging. But with grounded humor and adaptive resilience, Yuhas navigates her industry determined to keep the human in storytelling, and uplift like-minded artist communities through service and mentorship.
Here, she explores her creative journey from past to present—from when she first felt a spark of inspiration to now, where she confidently embraces change while staying true to her values.
Shiwon Oh: What drove you to become a storyteller in your field?
Stephanie Yuhas: When I was in the first grade, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I said, “An adult, I guess?”
She laughed and explained that I could be anything. I asked if I could make a movie like The Little Mermaid, and she said yes.
So I explained that right then and there, I wanted to make a story that people liked so much that they dressed up as it for Halloween. Not because it was popular, but because I loved The Little Mermaid because I felt just like her.
Even as a very small child, I had already decided I wanted to be a storyteller because I wanted people to feel seen and represented in media.
Many decades later, I still feel exactly the same way.
I think that's the fundamental reason I tell stories. The best stories give you that strange little moment of recognition: Oh. Someone else feels this way, too. You see yourself in a character, a joke, a situation, or even an absurd little detail and suddenly something that felt private and isolating becomes universal.
That first-grade motivation has actually been remarkably durable. The mediums have changed, the technology has changed, my job titles have changed, and my career has taken some spectacularly weird turns, but I still want to make people feel seen.
And I still think making something people love enough to dress up as for Halloween is a pretty good career goal. So far I’ve worked on things where that’s happened (tattoos, too!), but it hasn’t happened for one of my originals yet.
SO: How have your respective industries—nonprofit, entertainment, creative—changed with rising technology? How have you adapted to current-day disruptions?
SY: I have basically spent my entire career watching technology disrupt the creative industries and occasionally being told that the latest technology was going to ruin everything.
I was one of the last graduating classes to learn how to animate by hand in multiple mediums: cel, paper with a pegboard, stop-motion, paint on glass, rotoscoping. I learned 16mm Bolex, a Marantz, and a Steenbeck, while the class right after me was investing in MacBooks.
Several of my teachers told us computers were a “fad” and that only film was actually real.
Cut to—which is a film editing reference, by the way—computer animation, from 2-D to 3-D, replacing most practical effects, and now AI.
But the technology didn't just change how we made things. It changed how people experienced them.
When I was running a nonprofit media arts organization, our mission was specifically to help creatives get their work onto the big screen. We wanted filmmakers to experience an actual audience: to hear people laugh in the same room, meet them afterward, form teams, and make things together.
Then the audience started changing.
People stopped showing up to their own premieres and instead wanted to know what second they could upload their film to YouTube. We began receiving letters saying, “Just mail me my trophy.”
So we adapted. We brought in celebrity guests, red carpets and other events to make filmmaking feel like something you actually had to leave your house to experience. I became increasingly interested in immersive experiences because I was fascinated by what technology couldn't replace: being physically present with other people.
Meanwhile, I was learning the online world myself, even though my teachers had specifically told me never to upload things to YouTube.
I ignored them.
I ended up on the front page of YouTube back when YouTube had a front page and “Chocolate Rain” was part of the cultural landscape. I was featured on MySpace, which led to a popular blog, which led to my first book deal, which led to a television development contract, then another one, and eventually brought me back online and, ultimately, back to books.
I've gone around the world rolling with the punches.
I've also learned not to confuse a particular medium with the story itself.
The medium, technology and business model will change. The way audiences discover, consume and interact with stories will evolve.
But we’ve been telling stories the same way since people sat around campfires and lived in caves. The message will always be more important than the medium.
I'm not afraid of new tech (I’m more afraid of policy around tech, but that’s another story.) I think technology, when used ethically, is a tool, just like a camera, a paintbrush, a Steenbeck, a MacBook or a phone. Tools change but what makes a story powerful is humanity.
If anything, having lived through so many technological disruptions has made me less precious about the tools and more protective of the thing underneath them: the human reason we're telling the story in the first place.
SO: What communities have supported you throughout your growth, and how do you pay it forward to up-and-coming artists?
SY: My first real support came from my university, the old University of the Arts, when I was launching my nonprofit that paid it forward to artists from 2006-2021. U-Arts lent us space, donated catering and personnel, and promoted what we were doing. That support was incredibly meaningful.
At the same time, I felt less supported when it came to understanding how to actually build a career. There was a culture in my corner of art school that sometimes felt like artistic one-downmanship. We were taught how to make the art, but not necessarily how to make a living from it. There weren't classes on the actual business of selling a television show, just as there weren't classes on how to write a grant.
There seemed to be an assumption that if you would graduate, someone would hand you a sack of money. If that didn’t happen, oh gee, you must not have suffered hard enough. Oh, brother...
So the communities that ended up helping me the most were other creatives who were mucking about in the same arena of “What the heck happens now?”
That's something I try to tell artists constantly: don't look at your peers as competition. They're your potential collaborators.
Even when you aren't working together directly, skill-sharing is incredibly valuable. Someone may know how to pitch. Someone else knows how to write a grant. Someone else understands distribution. Someone else knows a producer you don't know or a mandate that doesn’t fit their project but is perfect for yours. We all have pieces of the puzzle.
The Ottawa International Animation Festival was particularly game-changing for me. Their television animation conference gave me opportunities I simply hadn't known existed. I won an opportunity to pitch at Pitch THIS!, which got me my first option. I met major studios through Fast Track. The exposure I received through Iron Developer nearly landed me my biggest international animated series yet.
Hollywood Pitch Fest helped me find representation, although by then I already had two options underway from developing my original intellectual property independently.
And Women in Animation helped me get my first mentorship at Netflix, which is why I’m currently a mentor for WIA. That original mentorship also gave me something I hadn't realized I was missing: a title.
“Creator.” I remember literally blinking twice when my mentor told me my title.
The funny thing is, I had spent years being educated to do essentially everything. In animation school, the expectation was that you could take a project from top to bottom: character design, animation, sound design, voice-over, music, editing. Most of my classmates literally did everything.
So I had accumulated a whole lot of education without ever really knowing what my job was called. Creator? It still feels weird and godlike. Moms are creators. I write ridiculous scenarios about robots.
These days I usually call myself a storyteller, or, more accurately, a creative weirdo, because my work crosses so many mediums. I still love television and features the most, but there is something incredibly liberating about being able to have a funny conversation with your loved ones and turn an inside joke into an essay, short story, or piece of satire in a few days.
It’s not as fancy, but it certainly gives more regular dopamine than years of development hell, test audiences, and having your project written off in a merger. But without the difficult parts of the process, we wouldn’t have so many of the beloved stories that are household names…so I keep trying.
Hollywood can sound very fancy from the outside, but if you're a storyteller, you had better know how to tell a story in 30 seconds or less, anywhere, anytime. We call that an elevator pitch.
But really, it's a metaphor for the whole career. You need to be able to explain what you do, what you care about, and why someone else should care, too.
I want the artists coming up behind me to have more of that information than I had. I want them to know that asking for help isn't a weakness, that careers are rarely linear, and that sometimes the person who changes your career isn't the person with the biggest title. It might be another weird creative sitting next to you at a conference who you split a bagel with because you’ve been in line to pitch your soul in five minutes or less and you’re about to fall over.
I've been incredibly lucky to find those people (and bagels) throughout my career. I truly think it can only happen when you embrace the art of the story that is springing out of you in the moment, rather than stress about the hypothetical robot apocalypse or fall into existential collapse because you think you missed your window for 15 minutes of fame in aught six.