ILLUSTRATION
Magazine covers
For the cover of the 2 January 2025 issue of Nature, I illustrated the research of Leo Speidel, Pontus Skoglund and colleagues, which allows subtle differences in ancestry to be reconstructed in high resolution. The researchers use their technique to examine the genomic history of early medieval Europe, including ancestry expanding into Scandinavia before the Viking Age. The cover is inspired by the serpentine carvings found on Viking Age runestones and features the Elder Futhark runes for the DNA nucleotides A, T, G and C (K).
For the cover of the 4 August 2023, issue of Science, I illustrated the research of Éadaoin Harney and her collaborators on the DNA from 27 African Americans buried at Catoctin Furnace, Maryland, where enslaved people labored between 1774 and 1850. The tree trunk forms a double helix comprising 27 segments representing each sequenced individual. Chromosome-shaped leaves signify their 41,799 detected modern relatives. At the roots I drew the names of 271 enslaved Catoctin Furnace workers.
For the cover of the 30 March 2023 issue of Nature, I illustrated the archaeogenetic research of Chapurukha Kusimba, Esther Brielle, Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Jeffrey Fleisher, and David Reich. Inspired by an 1896 photo of a Swahili woman, I redrew her clothing patterns to depict the meeting and mixing of Persian and African peoples along the Swahili coast circa 1000 AD.
For the cover of the 26 August 2022 issue of Science, I illustrated the groundbreaking research of geneticists David Reich and Iosif Lazaridis. My image, inspired by Bronze Age art, depicts people of five cultures spreading their genes between West Asia and Southeast Europe (from left to right: Mycenaean, Minoan, Hittite, Armenian, and Urartian). The researchers analyzed a total of 1317 ancient genomes spanning 10,000 years to reveal connections between these regions that are invisible in modern DNA.
Select editorial and interpretive work
Pencil drawings for the endpapers of Tree Story (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020)
Woodcut spot illustrations for The Smart Swarm (Avery, 2010)
Watercolor and vine charcoal for Where the Animals Go (W. W. Norton, 2018)
Pen and watercolor spot illustrations for A Lantern of Fireflies (826MI, 2015)
Stages of Stonehenge (National Geographic, June 2008)
One of eleven interpretive signs I researched, wrote, and illustrated for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
Logo for a film production company, based in Minnesota