Sketching biodiversity across space and time
Abby McBride is a freelance sketch biologist, science writer, and National Geographic Explorer. She uses field sketching as a tool for studying life on earth, communicating about ecology and evolution, and helping people connect to nature. Beyond sketching, she works on a wide range of collaborative projects that aim to protect global ecosystems by bringing together art, science, natural history, multimedia storytelling, and other disciplines and perspectives. Feel free to get in touch about workshops, exhibitions, expeditions, or other possibilities. See original art and prints for sale. 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 stories 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 spent the better part of a year living out of an old station wagon in New Zealand as a Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow, sketching and writing stories about the world’s fastest-declining group of birds—seabirds—for the National Geographic Society newsroom. More recently she has been drawing book illustrations, skating on Swedish ponds, and teaching sketching to geology and archaeology students.
Abby is based in downeast Maine. Her local work focuses on making connections between Wabanaki community members and coastal conservation organizations. See more projects.
