Liza Donnelly is a writer and award-winning cartoonist with The New Yorker Magazine, where she has been drawing cartoons and writing about culture and politics for forty years. She has contributed to CBS News and CNN, creating political cartoons as well as live-drawing special cultural and political events. Donnelly writes and draws for The New York Times and CNN Opinion pages and the Washington Post. Liza is also a screenwriter, working on her third feature and currently pitching a documentary.
Donnelly delivered a very popular TED talk, which was translated into 40 languages and viewed over 1.4 million times. She is a return speaker at SXSW, has delivered talks at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, The New Yorker Festival, five TEDxes (most recently in Charlottesville, Virginia), universities, NGOs and corporate venues in the US and abroad. Donnelly has been a Cultural Envoy for the US State Department, traveling around the world to speak about freedom of speech, cartoons and women’s rights.
Donnelly is the creator of a new digital visual journalism called live drawing. For CBS News, CNN and The New Yorker, she covered the DNC in 2016, and the 2017 Inauguration, White House Press conference, political protest marches. According to NBC News, Donnelly is “a pioneer of on-the-fly sketching of live events” wherein she quickly cartoons people and events on her tablet and immediately tweets them out, sometimes with humorous and insightful commentary on the drawing or in the tweet.
In 2016, Donnelly was the first cartoonist to be granted access on location to live draw the Academy Awards and red carpet. Both on location and remotely, she covered presidential debates, State of The Union, The Impeachment Trial, election returns, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the BET Awards, the Tonys, the Olympics, World Cup, Superbowl, literary events, and more. Along with CBS News and The New Yorker, her clients include Fusion, The New York Times, BET, Medium, PBS, Narrative Magazine, ESPN, Stanford University, The Hindustan Times and others. Her innovative approach to reporting and commenting on events with live drawing has been covered in various publications and video profiles in Time, CBSNews.com, NBC News.com, Ad Week, USA Today, CNET, and People Magazine.
Donnelly was profiled on CBS Sunday Morning, MSNBC.com, NBC, has appeared on CBS This Morning, and has been interviewed on radio and in numerous magazines, newspapers and online. Donnelly’s cartoons and commentary can be seen on various websites: The New Yorker, Politico, CNN, Huffington Post, Salon, Daily Beast, Fusion, Narrative Magazine. Her work has appeared in print, including The New York Times, Ms., Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, South Hampton Review, Jerusalem Post, Hindustan Times and The Harvard Business Review. Donnelly is the author/editor of seventeen books. Donnelly is a member of the international project Cartooning for Peace, helping to promote understanding through humor. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions globally, and she has curated exhibits of international cartoonists, here and abroad. Donnelly taught at Vassar College and the School of Visual Arts.
Donnelly is currently Visiting Scholar at Vassar College, and is a Distinguished Athena Fellow at Barnard College, and a recipient of an honorary PhD from University of Connecticut (where she delivered the Graduate School Commencement address), was a Thurber Prize finalist (the award for written humor in the United States), and is a recipient of a Reuben Award, the Salon St. Just International Prize, France, the AAUW Women of Distinction Award, and the Forte Dei Marmi, Italy, Satire Award. She was honored with a solo exhibition in 2020 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Her cartoons are in the Library of Congress Prints Collection, The Museum of Illustration and in private collections, and her cartoons are collected in numerous books around the world. A member of PEN America, the AAEC and Author’s Guild.
She lives in New York with her husband, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin.
For inquiries on speaking engagements, original art or assignments contact Liza at liza@lizadonnelly.com
“Donnelly’s cartoons are the best kind of funny—sly, smart, and right on the money. [They] are great social commentary as well as great fun.” Susan Orlean, 2010
“Liza often steps out from behind her drawing table to make this world not just a funnier place, but a better one too.” Planet Green, 2010
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