The Animation Industry Doesn’t Credit Its Women, Here’s the Proof

Alejandra “Aleloop” Leibovich’s career began with a job she never got. While studying film in Buenos Aires, she was already directing shorts and editing student projects when a television executive, her friend’s father, mentioned an opening in his station’s editing department. He had seen her talent, praised her work, and said she was the obvious choice. But when the job became available, he gave it to her brother instead.Her brother wasn’t an editor. He wasn’t even studying film.

When Alejandra asked why, the executive smiled and said, “I can get you a job in makeup. There are no girls directing. That’s just how it goes.”That moment, she later said, was the first time she saw sexism not as an obstacle, but as a wall she’d have to leave the country to get around. “I remember thinking, what am I doing here?” It wasn’t self‑pity it was resolve. The realization that if talent didn’t matter there, she would have to go somewhere it did.

Years later, that same tension followed her into international media. “All my life, my career was about creating everything to get attention for my shows, my channels,” she said. “I worked for so many years and won so many of those awards and made a ton of money, but I was always promoting someone else’s content."

That imbalance, she said, is structural: “If I go back and do my show for Nickelodeon, my show is Nickelodeon’s. I’d have maybe five percent of the merch. They own the IP.”Alejandra’s motion‑design fingerprints are everywhere. Over two decades she produced more than 3,000 animated commercials and campaigns for some of television’s biggest networks, becoming one of the creative forces that shaped the 2000s pop‑television identity.

As senior art director, her work helped define how pop culture looked, moved, and felt. To garner this influence, Alejandra overcame many obstacles in which her artistic voice was silenced or stifled, contributing to her later pursuit of complete artistic autonomy and recognition.

What happened to Alejandra isn’t unique, it mirrors a wider trend in animation. According to Gitnux’s 2025 study, women fill a very small percentage of key creative roles in animation studios, and hold even smaller percentage of leadership positions. This echoes the early barriers faced by Alejandra in Buenos Aires, when her work was overlooked before it even began.

A pattern reflected across the industry, across 400 top‑grossing films from 2016‑2019, women accounted for just 21.6 % of all VFX credits, and held only 16.2 % of leadership positions, such as VFX supervisor, according to a study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and Women in Animation.

When Alejandra finally stepped away from network life, she wasn’t escaping failure, she was leaving a career full of successes where the work she created rarely carried her name. “I spent my whole career creating worlds for others,” she reflected. “Now I’m building my own.”

That world became The World of Aleloop—a multiverse of colour, humour, and emotional storytelling where she directs, designs, and authors everything under her own banner. The shift wasn’t about ego. It was about integrity. After decades of ghosting her own work behind brands, she wanted authorship that was visible, feminine, and free.And yet, she carries that early Buenos Aires lesson like a watermark. Every exhibition, character, and design she creates is signed “Aleloop” her chosen name, her reclamation of identity through art.

Leibovich’s story doesn’t end in bitterness, it ends in authorship. The same woman who once defined television’s visual chaos now defines her own creative order. “I’ve been developing my own voice,” she said. “At 50, I figured it out.”

Her journey is proof that recognition isn’t given, it’s built. And for Alejandra Leibovich, the work of a lifetime has been to make sure her name finally appears on the worlds she creates.