Zina Saunders

A native New Yorker, Zina Saunders is the daughter of illustrator Norman Saunders. She attended High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union (dropping out a short way into the course) but also learned much about painting and commercial art from her father. She has illustrated for a variety of publishers (Simon & Schuster, Random House, Scholastic Books, Oxford University Press), while contributing to magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Time Out New York and Outré. Her book Overlooked New York (2009) is a collection of interviews, profiles and portraits of diverse New York subcultures and hobbyists. Subjects include amateur astronomers, bike messengers, carnival costume designers, cricket players, keepers of rooftop pigeon coops, kite flyers, scuba divers, street performers, subway musicians and urban gardeners. The project began in the fall of 2004 with her observation of colorful, decorative bicycles. In 2010, for Mother Jones, she began creating regular weekly animations (which feature Saunders doing the voices of all the characters). In November 2009, Overlooked New York was published as a book, collecting more than 60 of the profiles and portraits.