1968

Cartoonist

David Cypress was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Williams College in 1968 and went on to study Russian history at the Faculty of Soviet Studies at Harvard University. He left Harvard before receiving his degree to pursue a career as a cartoonist.

David has been a full-time cartoonist at The New Yorker since 1998. He published about seven hundred cartoons in the magazine. During the 2012 presidential election, he became the first daily cartoonist on The New Yorker website, and also repeated as a daily cartoonist in 2014 and twice in 2016, covering presidential primaries and national elections. His current daily cartoons continue to appear on the site newyorker.com in 2021. His cartoons have also appeared in Time, Parade, Playboy, Funny Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Men’s Health, Gastronomica, Shambhala Sun, Narrative, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Spectator, Air Mail Weekly and many other publications and related websites. He was a weekly cartoonist for The Boston Phoenix newspaper for twenty-five years.

He was the recipient of the Ruben Award of the National Society of Cartoonists in 2016 for creating comics.

David has published eight collections of his cartoons, and his drawings appear in many New Yorker cartoon collections, including “The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons” and “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker”. They also appear in “The Bounce Collection: Cartoons You’ve Never Seen and Will Never See in The New Yorker”, in “The Best of Bounce Collection” and “Bounce Collection, Volume 2”.

David was one of the creators, screenwriter and host of “Conversations with Cartoonists”, a series of on-stage interviews with artists from New York, including Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, George Booth and many others, at the Dixon Place Theater in New York. He was interviewed about his work on NPR and Sixty Minutes. He has lectured extensively on his work and the art of creating cartoons, including at the Rubin Museum in New York, the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, Vermont, the Yale Art Museum of Yale University and Williams College. He even lectured on “Queen Mary II” while working as a cartoonist at sea — a collaboration between Cunard Lines and The New Yorker.   Videos of these performances have gained many thousands of views.

In 2015, The New Yorker released a short film about David: “The Making of a New Yorker Cartoon.” He has more than 20,000 views on YouTube.

David has published seventeen essays on personal history on The New Yorker website, newyorker.com.  In February 2017, he appeared on MSNBC (“AM Joy – The Joy Reid Show”) and on The Canadian Broadcast Corporation to discuss his essay for the New Yorker, “How to Stay Sane while Being a Cartoonist in Trumpland”.

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Ginny Schubert, a lawyer and activist involved in health and housing issues.

Reference: davidsipress.com, 2020