Zina Saunders

Who is Zina Saunders?

Zina Saunders is a Manhattan-based artist, writer, animator and educator. In 2010, for Mother Jones, she began creating regular weekly animations. Her book Overlooked New York is a collection of interviews, profiles and portraits of diverse New York subcultures and hobbyists.

A native New Yorker, Saunders attended High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union but also learned much about painting and commercial art from her father, illustrator Norman Saunders. She has illustrated for a variety of publishers, while contributing to magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Time Out New York and Outré.

Her Overlooked New York 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, as she explained:

She wrote about the Puerto Rican Schwinn Club for Time Out New York and returned in the August 11, 2005 issue with profiles of Central Park portrait artists.