Liza Donnelly (Cartoonist/Feminist/Author)

on Thursday, 25 November 2010.

Liza Donnelly (born 1955) is an American cartoonist, best known for her work in The New Yorker.

She sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1979, and they began to appear regularly in that magazine in 1982, at which time she was the youngest, and one of only three women cartoonists at the magazine.

Donnelly’s work has appeared in many other national publications, including The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, The Nation, Audubon, Glamour (magazine), Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan (magazine), National Lampoon (magazine), American Photographer, Scholastic News, Cobblestone, and Habitat. Online publications that have published Donnelly's work include wowOwow, The Daily Beast, and Open Salon.

In the interview below, she talks about how and why she started cartooning, and about her book When Do They Serve The Wine? which, after watching this video you will most certainly want to buy – or at least I did!.

She is on the faculty at Vassar College, where she teaches Cartoons in American Culture and Women’s Studies.

A self-described feminist, in her book, Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists And Their Cartoons, Donnelly chronicles the history of women in New Yorker cartoons, both as illustrators and as subjects. In Sex & Sensibility, which Donnelly edited, cartoons from ten female cartoonists explore the female perspective on love and sex.

Shortly after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Donnelly spoke at the United Nations on behalf of Cartooning For Peace.

Donnelly is married to fellow New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin.