Abby McBride is a sketch biologist, science writer, and Fulbright–National Geographic Storytelling Fellow. She uses field sketching to explore the past, present, and future of global biodiversity. Feel free to get in touch about sketching workshops, art exhibitions, original art and prints for sale, illustration projects, multimedia storytelling projects, and collaborations in the field. Sign up to receive occasional newsletters.

BIOGRAPHY

After studying biology at Williams College, Abby took the obvious next steps and worked on three farms in Spain, drew nature illustrations in New York City, manned the helm of a Maine lobster boat, bird-blogged across the western United States, researched siblicidal boobies on an uninhabited Galapagos island, coached swimming, taught piano lessons, helped revise an invasion ecology textbook, and worked as a pastry chef, in roughly that order.

Next she went to MIT for a graduate degree in science writing, wrote for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bowdoin College, developed a communications program for the American Ornithological Society, sketched icebergs in Iceland, babblers in Borneo, and giraffes in Kenya, and somehow ended up traveling from Pisa to Budapest on a three-speed bicycle with a basket in front. She also spent a year in New Zealand sketching and writing stories about seabirds for National Geographic and the Fulbright Program (as shown below).

Abby’s most recent projects include drawing book illustrations, skating on Swedish ponds, and teaching sketching to geology and archaeology students. When not elsewhere, she sketchbiologizes in downeast Maine.