Alumnae Artists: Emma Allen ’06

Ms. Emma Allen ’06 is happiest when she’s looking at and talking about art. As the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, she self-identifies as “an obsessive, totally nerdy fan of art and jokes.”

After graduating from Brearley, Ms. Allen studied visual art and English at Yale and started her career working in art journalism. She’s previously written satirical criticism about the art world, and created an online vertical (digital publication) at the New Yorker for “offbeat humor.” 

“I keep making, shaping, and shepherding work that I love into the world,” she says. “Jokes, like success, are fleeting,” she notes, and she’s always thinking about how to make better content. 

Ms. Allen has fond memories of her “brilliant teachers” at Brearley, sharing, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Ms. Anna Bialobroda, who was an art teacher of mine for many years, who agreed to teach an after-school sculpture class in which I carved a hunk of actual marble into a lion.”

Ms. Frances Thorndike was one of her earliest humor influences in fifth grade, “schooling me in the art of a totally droll commitment to a bit. I genuinely thought that the Corner Bookstore was called the Borner Cookstore for years,” she admits. 

Ms. Allen learned about rewriting narratives “in a way that’s weird and funny” from her history teacher Mr. Tom Harrison, and her love of words stems from Dr. Jim Mulkin, who made her “love every single word of every single language, however absolutely dead that language was—the deader the better.”

She offered encouragement to Brearley students interested in pursuing the arts, saying, “if you have a unique perspective, or voice, or style—that’s what separates you from the robots.”

Photo credit: Anna Watts