We recently connected with Lizzie Ku-Herrero and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Lizzie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been one of the most interesting investments you’ve made – and did you win or lose? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

Ok so the worst investment I ever made as a business owner (Co-Founder at Super Dope) was the best investment I ever made as a human. Generally speaking, it was an investment into myself: both through therapy and a life coaching program called Living Bravely (specifically structured for 1st and 2nd generation WOC). Starting Super Dope with my buddies felt like the culmination of all my accomplishments and climbing within my career. I MADE my own seat at the table and got to a point where I felt like I should have been flying. But in my heart, I was struggling with this feeling like it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a feeling that there was a lot to do before Super Dope felt like a success, it was the feeling that no matter how far I took this, I would never be happy. And that realization was a very heavy wakeup call that something wasn’t right in my noggin.

Jumping into therapy and a group coaching program was an enormous time and financial commitment that at first felt pretty risky. I didn’t know if it would be worth the commitment but I was in a pretty deep depressive dip and so I took the leap to seek help.

What happened was I was able to take a hard look at my life along side other women of color! I started to deconstruct my habits and thought patterns, and I started to notice enormous similarities in our experience. Ultimately, I learned how much I was living my life for other people. I can’t stress enough how life changing it was to be validated by people with similar experiences. I started to understand where a lot of my anxiety and people pleasing was coming from and why I was having a hard time with it. Living Bravely also taught me how a lot of the tools I used as a kid to get to where I was now wasn’t serving me anymore- it was actually hurting me. Being a ruthless hardworker had made me a master of my craft but it did not help me structure a life or business that were aligned with my values. I learned that I was garbage at speaking my mind and I had so little trust in myself.

It honestly felt like I had my head underwater and I have been swimming my ass off in this one direction. And you don’t want to slow down or stop because you could lose momentum. Or even worse: it was disorienting, and frankly, embarrassing, to realize how far off course I had swam for so long. No one wants feel like an idiot in the moment where you lift you head and go, “Shit! When did I get here?!”

As hard as it was to leave my team, the investment into myself made me realize I needed to step away from Super Dope, take some time off, and re-evaluate. I decided it’s more important for me to lift my head out of the water, look around a little bit, and see where I actually want to go than to swim a million more miles towards something I don’t love.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Elizabeth Ku-Herrero, I go by Lizzie and I come from the world of CG Animation! I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and hit the ground running as a promising young talent. My thesis film won awards all over the world, most notably a Student Academy Award, Student Emmy, Art Director’s Club Black Cube, and it felt like the world was my oyster. Being in New York, I did animation for advertising, so I like to tell people: “Think Pixar, but for commercials.” I worked as the CG Lead at Nathan Love, taught at SVA, and freelanced some more. This is until 2020, while others were getting hot and heavy with some jig saw puzzles, I moved across the country and started a remote animation studio in Portland, Oregon, called Super Dope, along side my 2 friends and partner. Until very recently, I left my company, freelanced for a little bit, and just started a self-funded sabbatical. I was trained as a technical CG Artist: meaning I’m a specialized contract worker. What people don’t know about CG Animation is that it has a ton of focuses and requires enormous teams and money. As an artist, I prided myself on having a big range of skills. I design, model, shade, light, composite, create clothes, and do hair. But after leading, running a company, and also teaching at SVA, I started to wear more hats, solve bigger problems, and obviously move past the role of artist into business owner.

I believe within the industry, I’m known for high quality but a cartoony style as well as being a kind of goofy character myself. I’m a bit relentless in finding work that I connect to and am not one to sit still if something just ain’t it. But most importantly, to me, I’m a multiracial woman in yet another industry where people don’t quite look like me.

I think as a creative, being a woman of color has been a really turbulent identity to grapple with. Art is supposed to be a reflection of ourselves. But how can we successfully express ourselves when the world tells us that who we are isn’t what is wanted (what sells)? As a youngin, when I looked at what fellow artists posted on the popular CG hubs, I saw robots and big tittied ladies. All that said to me was- this isn’t for you. You don’t belong. And so a lot of my career, I believe, has been me trying to understand and also prove where I fit.

And that’s me in a nutshell. Lot’s of pent up rage in a creative body. Woo hoo!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Exploration and freedom, baby! I know this word gets thrown around a lot, but I feel that a lot of my past was covered in a giant blanket of being gaslit. I was gaslit as a child. I was gaslit as a woman. I was gaslit as a person of color. I was gaslit as a multiracial 1st generation American. And when you exist in all these different boxes, you can be bombarded with invalidation. The way that showed up in my career is there were just so many moments when I wanted to push a certain vision and my team thought it was too much. It was too loud. It was too raunchy. It was too sentimental. It was too me. And this just makes me cackle now. I feel like I’m at a place in my journey where I refuse to let my voice be censored. I now can create and play in those spaces where people in the past had told me it was too much. I really just want to see what happens when I let myself be myself. Hold on to your butts.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One of my favorite stories is my most validating one. My team and I, at Super Dope, were working on a short film with a client in which we were designing a big diverse set of characters. We had a couple character designs in there that were east asian and had longer thinner eyes. Our client passed these by their PR team and said the designs were going to be a no-go. They were too offensive. Let me just -WOOP- take you back in time just a couple months prior. I’m working on a different project, and instead of being a Director on the spot, I’m an artist. The client wants to make an avatar of a girl who is east asian. We create an avatar. The team thinks it is offensive. So the two main directors, who are two white men, decide to make the woman have more anglo-saxon features to “not offend” anyone. So they’re solve was to get rid of the asian woman and make her white.

Now flash back to the new job I’m on, where I’m a director, and we’re in the middle of this call where they say to us- “We should get rid of these eyes. It’s offensive.”

I felt my face get red because I was so enraged at what was being defined as offensive. It felt like it was very much coming from one lens: a white one. Some how my fury was enough for me to open my mouth and finally speak up.

I said, as an east asian, from my own experience, I find it more offensive to get rid of these eyes. When you change asian features for white features you are telling people who look like me that our eyes are not welcome here. That they can’t be beautiful. That my eyes are wrong.

The room was silent and I felt like I was going to puke. I had spent so much of my childhood hating my Asianness in a white world, and here I was telling white people that my people deserve room on the screen. But then something beautiful happened. They listened to me and admitted their own ignorance and agreed to keep them in.

In that moment, I felt so much pride that I had worked so hard to be in a position where I had a seat at the table. I finally felt like I could contribute to the discussion about representation, and I was there representing people who were tormented and harassed for looking like me. I sent a special fuck you into the ether to all those people who bullied me, and then patted myself on the back. Brave girls do brave things.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://elizabethkuherrero.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizziebutt_poo/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethnku/
• Other: https://www.twitch.tv/lizziebutt_poo

Image Credits
Photographs by Eric Cunha. Some illustrations are my own personal projects. Some illustrations are property of Super Dope.