Depicting the imagined goings-on of the animal world, Lea Zalinskis creates cheeky, color-saturated illustrations entirely from hand-cut paper. She makes work on commission, designs prints and cards, and makes labels for neat companies like Rhetoric Coffee. Her award-winning Night Heron design appears on Oakland Public Library membership cards and can be kept right in your pocket. As a contributor at Hitrecord.org, Lea has conceptualized animation, provided art direction, and created artwork for both print and screen, much of which has appeared on the Emmy Award winning television show HITRECORD on TV. She recently completed her first paper cutout stop-motion animation Seashells, a music video for singer/songwriter Rachel Garlin. It has been awarded “Outstanding Animation” by The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival.

Lea graduated from California College of the Arts with a BFA in Photography before returning to her first love of illustration. She loves animals, bugs, good coffee, and laughing until she cries. In the studio she can often be found amidst a large pile of multicolored scraps, tweezers in hand, gluing pieces of paper to other paper. Sometimes she finds paper in her shoes. She lives in California with a trusty cat named Minna, who, despite the tempting flurry of art materials, has not once sabotaged a single illustration.