Participant Biographies

Sue Coe (born 21 February 1951) is an English-born, American artist and illustrator working primarily in drawing, printmaking, and in the form of illustrated books and comics. Her work is in the tradition of social protest art and is highly political. Coe’s work often includes animal rights commentary, though she also creates work that centralizes the rights of marginalized peoples and criticizes capitalism. Her commentary on political events and social injustice are published in newspapers, magazines and books. Her work has been shown internationally in both solo and group exhibitions and has been collected by various international museums. She lives in Upstate New York and is represented by the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City.

Erika Doss is an art historian and professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her wide-ranging interests in American art are reflected in the breadth of her publications and public lectures, which typically engage the complexities of modern and contemporary American visual and material cultures including the nature of representation and issues of history, memory, and identity—national, cultural, and self.

Her books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image, American Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, and others. Doss is also co-editor of the “Culture America” series at the University Press of Kansas, and has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, American Art, Memory Studies, Public Art Dialogue, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. A recipient of several Fulbright Awards, Doss has also held fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wolfsonian, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.  In 2017, she was named to the first Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies Society of Fellows at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

D. B. Dowd is an illustrator, designer, and Professor of Art and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is faculty director of the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library, in the Division of Special Collections in Washington University Libraries, and has led the Society of Fellows at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, a program of the Norman Rockwell Museum. The author and illustrator of Spartan Holidays, an award-winning visual journal, Dowd has written and spoken extensively on published imagery and comics. His book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice was published by the Rockwell Center in 2018; A is for Autocrat is his most recent publication.

Rudy Gutierrez is an American illustrator and educator born in the Bronx, NY, of Puerto Rican heritage, and raised in Teaneck, NJ. He has been a professor of illustration at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he has taught since 1990. The artist’s work has appeared in films and performances, and on U.S. Postage stamps (Musical Icon Series of Jimi Hendrix), posters, and LP / CD covers. His artwork for Santana’s “Shaman” was used as a set design at the 2002 Super Bowl half-time show and for various products. More recently, his paintings have been commissioned for the film “Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary.” Featured in many public and private collections, his art is included in those of musical icons Carlos Santana, Clive Davis, and Wayne Shorter. Gutierrez’s many awards include the Society of Illustrators’ Dean Cornwell Recognition Hall of Fame Award, Distinguished Educator in the Arts Award, and Gold Medal. His children’s books have earned a Caldecott Honor Award, Pura Belpre Award, Americas Book Award, Children’s Africana Book Awards, and a New York Book Award. Communication Arts, Step by Step Graphics, Art News, American Illustration, American Artist and Art Direction Magazine have featured his art.

Steven Heller was for thirty-three years an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review. Heller is the co-founder and co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, where he lectures on the history of graphic design. Prior to this, he lectured on the history of illustration in the school’s MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program, and was director for ten years of SVA’s Modernism & Eclecticism: A History of American Graphic Design symposiums. For over two decades he has been contributing editor to Print, Eye, Baseline, and ID magazines, contributing hundreds of articles to these and other design and culture journals. The author, co-author, and/or editor of many books on design and popular culture, Heller has worked with a score of publishers, including Chronicle Books, Allworth Press, Harry N. Abrams, Phaidon Press, Taschen Press, Abbeville Press, Thames & Hudson, Rockport, Northlight, and more. Recent books include Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State, an anaylsis of how the major dictatorships used graphics to propagate their ideologies, and The Swastika and Symbols of Hate: Extremist Iconography Today, a comprehensive examination of the most powerful symbol ever created.

Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde diplomatique, and A Public Space, and in anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon and Schuster and Chronicle Books. Krug has received fellowships from Fulbright, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and her books are included in the Library of Congress and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Krug was named Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and 2019 Book Illustration Prize Winner by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home was chosen as a best book of the year by the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, Kirkus Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. It was the winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography Category), of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, the Art Directors Club gold cube and discipline winner cube, and the British Book Design and Production Award. Her visual biography, Kamikaze, about a surviving Japanese WWII pilot, was included in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and Best Non-Required Reading, and her animations have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Krug is Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Anita Kunz has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honor. She has lived in London, New York, and Toronto, contributing to magazines and working for design firms, book publishers, and advertising agencies in Germany, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Canada, South Africa, Holland, Portugal, France and England. Her work has been published regularly in Time magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, and The New York Times, among others, and she illustrated more than fifty book jacket covers. Kunz frequently teaches workshops and lectures at universities and institutions internationally including the Smithsonian and the Corcoran in Washington DC, The Art Center and Otis in Los Angeles, The School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York, and in Istanbul and Oslo. Her art is featured in the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, among others.

Kevin Moran is the executive editor of The Berkshire Eagle, which since its return to local ownership in 2016, has captured several Newspaper of the Year titles and General Excellence awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. A native of the Berkshires, Moran also has served as managing editor of The Berkshire Eagle, the Brattleboro Reformer and North Adams Transcript. A past president of the New England Associated Press News Executives Association, he also has been a mentor for foreign journalists with Alfred Friendly Press Partners.

Stephanie Haboush Plunkett is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum. The curator of many exhibitions relating to the art of illustration, including Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms; Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol; Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World; Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs; and The Unknown Hopper: Edward Hopper as Illustrator, she leads the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, the first scholarly institute devoted to the study of illustration art. She has taught graduate students at the Maryland Institute College of art and worked previously at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Heckscher Museum of Art. “The Shifting Postwar Marketplace: Illustration in the United States and Canada, 1940-1970” in History of Illustration, and Drawing Lessons from the Famous Artists School are recent publications.

R. Sikoryak is a cartoonist and author of the graphic novels Constitution Illustrated, The Unquotable Trump, Masterpiece Comics and Terms and Conditions (Drawn & Quarterly). His illustrations have appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, The Nation, NY Times Book Review, Fortune, and within many other publications. Sikoryak teaches at Parsons School of Design. Since 1997, he’s presented his live comics performance series, Carousel, around the U.S. and Canada. Visit rsikoryak.com or follow Instagram.com/rsikoryak/.

Christopher Sperandio is an artist, writer and university professor. A pioneer in the field of Social Practice, he has mapped the margins between mass and museum cultures for thirty years. Sperandio is an associate professor at Rice University where he founded the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop (cats.rice.edu), a space for comics learning and research. Pinko Joe, Sperandio’s first graphic novel, was published by Argle Bargle Books in 2020 and was called “laugh out loud hilarious” by Broken Pencil Magazine. Volume two of this series will appear in early 2021 via arglebarglebooks.com. Follow Sperandio on Instagram @pinko_joe or visit his web site pinkojoe.com.

Ryan Standfest is an artist, arts writer, and the editor-in-chief and publisher of Rotland Press, which presents satirical publications of a culturally relevant nature. His publications and prints are in numerous major collections, and his work has been exhibited widely, both in the United States and abroad. Standfest has penned criticism and essays for the Detroit arts and culture journal Infinite Mile, Detroit Art Review, and Essay’d. He contributed a chapter to the book Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik, forthcoming from Penn State University Press in 2021. Websites: ryanstandfest.com (studio) and rotlandpress.com (publishing).