Benita Epstein


Benita L. Epstein is a prolific gag cartoonist for magazines, greeting cards, websites and newspapers. She was a regular contributor to the comic strip Six Chix, distributed by King Features Syndicate.
Before becoming a cartoonist, Epstein earned a Bachelors and a Masters in Entomology. In addition to her studies of autism, lung surfactant, photosynthesis, purine metabolism and yellow-fever mosquitoes, she assisted her husband in ecological field research at islands around the world.

Cartoons

As a cartoonist, she has focused on women, relationships, business, medicine, science, the travel industry, Jewish lifestyle, holidays, professors and education. Her cartoons have been published in hundreds of publications, including Barron's, Better Homes and Gardens, Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker, Reader's Digest, USA Weekend and The Wall Street Journal. For Creators Syndicate, she created the daily comics feature Drawing a Crowd, which ran from January 2002 to June 2003. In 2006, she explained her working process:
In 2009, she told interviewer Scott Nickel, "I have the grapheme form of synesthesia where letters and numbers are perceived as colors. Others with this are the physicist Richard Feynman, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov."
Epstein has given drawing demonstrations to adult developmentally disabled and other handicapped students. She lives in Redding, California with her husband, stepson and their pug, Harley.

Awards

The National Cartoonists Society nominated Epstein four times for Best Magazine Gag Cartoonist and twice for Best Greeting Card Cartoonist.