Stephanie McMillan

Artist-In-Residence

Stephanie McMillan is a third-generation Fort Lauderdale resident. Her distinctive style combines affectionate humor with the bright colors of the sunny tropics.

McMillan earned a BFA in 1987 at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, with a focus in animation. Through 1991 she sold her art (mixed media and painting) at fairs and festivals in New England and around Florida. In 1992 she started working at a Fort Lauderdale alt-weekly (XS, which became City Link) and began drawing illustrations and editorial cartoons, for which she won several Florida Press Club awards. This led to 25 years as a widely-published freelance cartoonist and illustrator producing editorial cartoons, syndicated comic strips, comic journalism, and graphic novels. Awards include the RFK Journalism Award for cartooning (2012), and the Sigma Delta Chi award for editorial cartoons (2010). Clients included Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Scholastic/New York Times, and her hometown daily paper, the Sun-Sentinel.

In recent years she has returned to painting, drawing, and mixed media assemblage. From 2017-2020 she had a studio in Flagler Village, Fort Lauderdale — though its main income came from teaching “paint-and-sip” classes, it also served as a self-run gallery. During this time she also began selling artwork online, which has become her full-time occupation since closing her studio due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

McMillan had a solo show of editorial cartoons focused on the environmental crisis at California State University at Northridge (2011); and has participated in many group exhibitions including “The Art of Resistance,” Railroad Square, Tallahassee, Florida (2018); SCOPE International Contemporary Art Show, Miami Beach (2014); and “Too Hot to Handle,” San Franscisco Cartoon Art Musuem, and Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2003-2004). Two recent paintings are on permanent exhibit at Sailboat Bend II, an affordable housing complex for elders in Fort Lauderdale.

McMillan is the author and/or illustrator of several books including As the World Burns and The Beginning of the American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement (Seven Stories Press). Translations of several of her books have been published abroad, including in Turkey, Italy and France.

Her original sketches, illustrations, comics, and papers are archived at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.