Molly Crabapple talks about the last fourteen years she spent covering the frontlines of global conflict and protest with her sketchpad, from Ukraine and Palestine to her father’s island, Puerto Rico and her hometown of New York City. She speaks about the power of art in the age of ubiquitous images, the threats of AI to the livelihood of illustrators, and creativity and beauty even in the midst of collapse.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Toulouse Lautrec, Diego Rivera and Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War.’ She is the co-author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a NY Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award.
Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. In 2023, she was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, working on a history of the Jewish Labor Bund.
Molly got her start as the house artist for New York’s most notorious nightclub. She became a journalist sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street, before covering, with words and art, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lebanese snipers, Guantanamo Bay, the US-Mexican border, Pennsylvania prisoners, New York cabbies, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She once confronted Donald Trump in Dubai about the fact that his workers there got paid $100 a month. As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The ACLU. Her animations are on permanent display at The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
She has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, São Paulo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University and the New York Historical Society.