About

Maeve took a roundabout route to becoming an illustrator.

Though she has always been passionate about making art, she did her B.A. in English. After graduating in 2012, she was awarded a Watson Fellowship. The fellowship was a one-year grant to travel around the world, painting portraits in intentional communities and listening to their ideas about peace and utopia. This project found her living in a Quaker settlement in Costa Rica, interviewing Liberation Theologians in Peru, volunteering at a squatted community center in Denmark, planting trees in an ecovillage in southern India, living with Tibetan refugees in northern India, and learning about rebuilding society after ethnic conflict in Kyrgyzstan. 

When the fellowship year finished, Maeve still wasn't done seeing the world. She moved to Glasgow, Scotland where she had studied abroad for a year in college on a St. Andrew's Society of Philadelphia scholarship. Back in Glasgow, She tried her hand at being a chocolatier in a family-run chocolate shop, then moved to London the following year to work at the British Museum.

Now happily back at home in Pennsylvania with her English husband and 90-year-old grandmother, Maeve finds inspiration for her illustration in the organic shapes and movement of the natural world. She uses her x-ray vision to bring out the hidden colors of her subjects, and loves to incorporate a gentle silliness in her work.