Briaca Duesette Built the Pathway Detroit's Young Creators Needed

“Briaca Duesette founded Animation Discovery Studio in 2023 to connect Detroit youth to creative technology careers. Here’s how she built it—and why it matters.”

At the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit, during the summer of 2023, Briaca Duesette sat down in a classroom and completed her first animation project.

It was not a grand unveiling. No press. No pitch deck. Just a screen, a tool she had only recently learned to use, and a finished piece of work that hadn't existed the hour before. In that ordinary moment, something shifted. Animation wasn't just a creative outlet. It was a door — and she could see, clearly, that for too many young people in Detroit, no one had bothered to build the hallway leading to it.

She decided she would.

Briaca Duesette is the founder and creative director of Animation Discovery Studio and Animation Discovery Studio Hub, based in Detroit, Michigan. She describes her work in direct terms: she is becoming a builder of industries and opportunities by building a creative technology ecosystem — one that empowers the next generation of innovators, storytellers, and digital creators.

That framing matters. She is not running a program. She is constructing an ecosystem, brick by brick, in a city that has been building and rebuilding itself for longer than most of its residents have been alive.

Detroit is a city with serious technology ambitions and a documented workforce gap standing between its present and its potential. A regional analysis projects that Detroit could add 20,300 tech jobs and $6.8 billion in wages over five years — a transformation that would reshape what economic mobility looks like here. Yet the pipeline feeding that growth remains narrow. Women hold just 26% of regional tech jobs, according to figures cited by Detroit's own innovation community. Nationally, the structural picture is just as stark: Black professionals represent approximately 7% of the overall tech workforce and receive roughly 1% of venture capital funding, according to data frequently cited by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Kauffman Foundation research.

What those numbers mean, on the ground, is this: a teenager in Detroit with creative talent and no inherited network has very few clear roads into a high-growth tech career. The industry's imagination about who belongs in it has been too small for too long — and the economic cost of that narrowness is measured in billions of dollars of unrealized potential and generations of unrealized careers.

That is the problem Briaca Duesette is solving. And she is solving it through animation.

She came to this work without industry credentials, without startup capital, and without a local ecosystem of role models who had done exactly what she was trying to do. What she encountered, instead, was a familiar pattern: the pressure to prove the vision before any support would follow. To demonstrate traction before receiving the resources that make traction possible. To build credibility in a system that rarely extends it freely to Black women founders who are still in the process of becoming.

The barriers were structural. The response was to build anyway.

The classroom at the Apple Developer Academy was the hinge. She could have completed the project, filed it away, and moved on. Instead, she held onto the question the work raised: what happens to a young person who has this same experience, this same moment of recognition, but no one around them to tell them it's possible to make a career of it?

The answer she gave to that question became Animation Discovery Studio.

She started where she was. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit gave her both the technical foundation and the proof of concept — animation was learnable, and the tools were more accessible than the gatekeepers had made them appear. From there, she moved into Detroit's broader innovation infrastructure. Programs at TechTown Detroit helped her translate a personal discovery into an organizational framework. Support from Detroit's innovation community — including Black Tech Saturdays — helped her build the relationships and momentum that early-stage organizations run on when capital is still scarce.

She describes the hardest lesson she absorbed along the way not as a technical one, but as a personal one: building something meaningful required her to become someone new. The organization didn't need a person who had figured everything out. It needed a leader willing to grow into what the work demanded — and to do it while the work was already underway.

There is a persistent assumption that creative education programs are nice to have — supplemental, soft, adjacent to the real work of economic development. Animation Discovery Studio's record over its first two years is an answer to that assumption.

Founded in August 2023 in the weeks following Duesette's experience at the Apple Developer Academy, the organization has since delivered more than 100 workshops and served over 1,500 young people across Southeast Michigan (self-reported). Its partners include Downtown Boxing Gym, Detroit Public Schools Community District, Black Tech Saturdays, TechTown Detroit, and the Apple Developer Academy. In 2026, Animation Discovery Studio Hub received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status — a structural milestone that expands the organization's capacity to provide scholarships and sustained access to creative technology education (self-reported). The work has been recognized by FOX 2 Detroit, The Detroit News, and Global Detroit (self-reported).

That is not a program finding its footing. That is an ecosystem taking shape.

What Briaca Duesette is building has implications that extend well beyond any single young person's career trajectory. When the pathway exists — when there is an organization, a set of workshops, a mentor who looks like you, a proof of concept that animation can be a career and not just a hobby — the next person with a creative idea doesn't have to start from zero. They don't have to wonder whether technology is for them. They inherit the answer.

That inheritance compounds. One young person who finds a career in creative technology becomes a data point in the industry's record of who belongs here. That data point becomes a reference for the next young person, and the next employer, and the next funder deciding where to put their resources. This is how ecosystems grow: not through single breakthroughs, but through the steady accumulation of visible proof that a wider circle of people can participate, contribute, and lead.

Detroit's economic ambitions — those 20,300 jobs, that $6.8 billion in wages — will not be realized by continuing to draw from the same narrow pipeline. They will be realized by organizations like Animation Discovery Studio that are doing the concrete, unglamorous, essential work of building new ones.

If you believe Detroit's future in technology should belong to all of Detroit — not just the already-connected — here is what you can do right now: share this story with one educator, employer, parent, or community leader who believes young people deserve access to the future of technology. The ecosystem Briaca Duesette is building grows every time someone new decides to be part of it.

Learn more at animationdiscoverystudio.com or connect with Briaca on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/briacaduesette).