Lauren Weinstein

Biography

Lauren Weinstein is a cartoonist and artist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Nautilus, and The Guardian, among many other outlets. For the past twenty years, her funny, beautiful, and bizarre comics and graphic novels have addressed universal human issues such as mortality, time, motherhood, and most recently domestic violence.

 

Since 2019 she has been the artist-in-residence at Town Clock, CDC, teaching art the survivors that live there.  Her comic, “The Gift of Time” was featured on Slate.com.  She received the Stone-Deguire Prize from her alma-mater, Washington University, to continue her work at Town Clock. 

 

Her acclaimed comic Normel Person was the last weekly comic strip to run in The Village Voice. The comic was drawn in response to the tumultuous sociopolitical climate following Donald Trump’s election. In 2019, Weinstein’s Being An Artist And A Mother won the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize, and was published in Best American Comics 2019. The work originally ran in The New Yorker and is one of a series of visual essays Weinstein has done about matrescence—coming of age as a mother.

 

Mother’s Walk—a visceral meditation on all the ramifications of childbirth—was selected for Frontier, a quarterly art and comics monograph series. Weinstein is also the author of three books: Inside Vineyland (Alternative Comics, 2003), a collection of an early comic strip first published in The Seattle Stranger; the teenage memoir Girl Stories (Henry Holt and Co., 2006), which received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly; and an impossible-to-describe, science-fiction epic called Goddess of War (Picturebox, 2008). She has also received two Ignatz Awards and multiple award nominations. In 2015, Weinstein was awarded the Gold Medal from The Society of Illustrators for Carriers, her five-part webcomic about cystic fibrosis that was first published in Nautilus.

 

Weinstein earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Washington University. Currently, she is compiling a collection of comics about motherhood and working on a sequel to Girl Stories. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

 

Selected Reviews:

 

“This story cements her as one of comics’ best introspective thinkers and autobiographical cartoonists. Weinstein has a special ability to portray human emotion in a way that’s frank, humorous and warm.”

RJ Casey

 

“Mother’s Walk”  “…it's one of the smartest, funniest, most honest explorations of giving birth to a baby human that I've ever read.” —Myla Goldberg author of Bee Season

 

“We need more stories like this, told so thoughtfully, with such grace and acceptance of the messiness of life, and the profound joys that can come even when everything around you seems rotten. This book is a rare gem. Treasure it.” —Chris Mautner, The Comics Journal

 

“an absolute masterwork,”— Alex Hoffman, Sequential State

 

“I urge you to seek it out. What a gift.” —Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter