The Full Story
Range. Conviction. The Work.
Zach didn't find art — art found him, the summer before his senior year of high school, at 3 a.m. with a sketchbook and no plan. What followed wasn't linear. Art school in San Francisco. Two jobs. Midnight classes. Sketchbooks filled in every spare hour. Rejections that taught him more than any acceptance could have. A Disneyland internship where he sketched guests on receipt paper between shifts, still convinced the dream was worth chasing.
It was. A chance meeting with his future leader turned into a studio tour — and two months later, an email that changed everything. Nearly a decade at Disney followed, where he learned to bring more than craft into the room. When he worked on the Coco merchandise line as a Mexican-American designer, he didn't just contribute artwork. He brought his grandmother's house, the songs, the history. Things no brief could ask for.
Today, Zach operates at the intersection of design, strategy, and brand — shaping product lines from the ground up with a Master's in Digital Marketing from Wake Forest backing the instinct. Outside Disney, he's building The Art Department, a streetwear brand rooted in the conviction that you should create what you can't explain, and VNCE, an original character IP with a skeleton astronaut and a world still being written.
"It was so impactful for me because of my heritage. To be able to talk about these things — the songs, the history — it really felt like Disney was coming into my own home."
Zach Gracia on the Coco project · Life at Disney, 2022
