She can draw in minutes. In fact she 'live draws.' The New Yorker and CBS cartoonist has a brilliant, subtle and nuanced thought on things around her. And it reflects in her works. Meet Liza Donnelly, who is among the few female cartoonists the world's seen and even fewer of the 'live drawing' tribe. Her work otherwise ranges from political to life and philosophy but we are reproducing some of her fantastic drawings that she shared with us at a SheThePeople event with American Centre recently on her visit to India.
Liza Donnelly is a cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker Magazine, and resident cartoonist for CBS News. She also contributes to The New York Times, Forbes, Politico and Medium. As a public speaker, she delivered a very popular TED talk that was translated into 38 languages and received almost 2 million online views. "When the internet became more and more used, I adopted it very quickly.I am the most technologically-advanced person in my family having me, my husband and two daughter who are in their twenties. When twitter came around I loved it although I did not quite know how to use it at first. It just seemed to be like a conversation with lots of people."
She travels globally to speak about freedom of speech and women’s rights, sometimes as a cultural envoy for the US State Department. She is New York Director of the international project, Cartooning for Peace, founded at the United Nations in 2006. Now known for her digital, live tweet drawings, Donnelly drew on-location at the Oscars and the Tonys for NewYorker.com, and covered the DNC in 2016 for CBS News.
Donnelly was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, MSNBC, as well as numerous radio and print interviews. Donnelly is the author of sixteen books, among them, a well received history: Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Women Cartoonists. She was visiting lecturer at Vassar College for four years and is a recipient of several awards: an honorary PhD from the University of Connecticut for her work for peace and women’s rights, the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award, the AAUW Women of Distinction Award, and was finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She lives in New York.
She also does political cartoons now more actively than before. The US Election with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got the best of her. Liza admits "I did not really get trolled as much before I did political cartoon. I assume a lot of Trump supporters came after me but I don't think that was personal, I think that was because I was attacking the candidate."