Steve Brodner (born 1954 in Brooklyn, New York) is
an American satirical illustrator and caricaturist working
for publications for a quarter century. A regular
contributor to The New Yorker since 1993, Brodner's
illustration work and art journalism has appeared in
most major magazines and newspapers in the United
States, such as Rolling Stone, The New Yor
Times, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Spy, Playboy, Mother
Jones, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The
Village Voice and Slate. His work, first widely seen
exposing and attacking Reagan-era scandals, is credited
with helping spearhead the 1980s revival of pointed
and entertaining graphic commentary in the US.
Brodner attended Cooper Union, in New York City and
graduated in 1976 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.
Brodner went on to work briefly for the Hudson
Dispatch in Hudson County, NJ after leaving college.
Between 1979 and 1982 he self-published theNew York
Illustrated News.
which featured his work as well as those of colleagues. In 1977, he began his freelance career with The New York Times Book Review,
working with Steven Heller, art director. Soon he was working with Lewis Lapham and Sheila Wolfe at Harper's on a monthly page of
commentary entitled Ars Politica. In the following year he became a regular contributor to magazines across the US, eventually becoming
house artist as well as writer and artist of monthly back pages for Esquire under the editorships of Lee Eisenberg, David Hirshey and the
designer, Rip Georges. During and after Esquire it was on to Spy Magazine and then to The New Yorker, under Tina Brown and then David
Remnick, Chris Curry, Caroline Maihot and Françoise Mouly, art directors. At Rolling Stone, under Jann Wenner and Amid Capesi, art
director, Brodner was the film review artist, working with Peter Travers, and later a series for National Affairs page with Matt Taibbi and
others.
In visual essays, Steve Brodner has covered eight
national political conventions for Esquire, The
Progressive, The Village Voice and others. His article
"Plowed Under", a series of portraits and interviews
with beleaguered farm families in the Midwest, ran
in The Progressive, which, at that time was a modern
mecca for political art, thanks to Patrick J. B. Flynn,
crusading art director. Shots From Guns, an art
documentary about the Colt Firearms strike in Hartford,
Connecticut, appeared in Northeast magazine in 1989.
For The New Yorker he covered Oliver North and the
1994 Virginia Senate race, the Patrick
Buchanan presidential campaign, the Million Man
March (1995) and an advance story on the 1996
Democratic Convention in Chicago.
That same year, The Washington Post asked him to profile the Bob Dole presidential campaign. In spring of 1997 he wrote and drew a tenpage article on the South by Southwest Music Festival for Texas Monthly. That summer, Brodner climbed Mount Fuji with author Susan
Orlean as an art-journalist for Outside Magazine and later that year he did a piece on the New York City mayoral campaign for New York
Magazine. His eight-page profile of George W. Bush appeared in Esquire in October 1998, in which Bush said to him, “Maybe I’ll see you in
national politics next year, maybe not. Either way, I have a cool life.” In 2000, he dealt with the difficult issue of guns in Pennsylvania
for Philadelphia Magazine. Texas Monthly published his 10-page story on Colonias (Mexican Americans along the Texas border), called "In
America", in May 2005 and in 2007 he traversed the Texas State House at Austin in a freewheeling story for Texas Monthly.
In the fall of 1996, Brodner was featured in PBS Fronline's The
Choice, as artist and commentator on the Clinton/Dole race. In
December 2007, Brodner began a series of online videos, The
Naked Campaign, at The New Yorker website, offering his take
on the 2008 Presidential campaign. From 2010 to the present
he has been producing videos for PBS' Need to Know, with "An
Editorial by Steve Brodner", a semi-regular commentary
feature. In the spring of 2010, his series of short political
videos, "Smashing Crayons" ran on Slate.com.