Ann Telnaes Creason Lecture Fall 2025
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes is scheduled to deliver the Joe Creason Lecture in Journalism this month.
The lecture, presented by the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media, will be 10-11 a.m. Monday, Sept. 15, in the Singletary Center for the Arts Recital Hall. Attendance is free and open to the public.
Telnaes’ work includes animation, visual essays, live sketches and traditional print. She was the editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post for nearly two decades before she resigned earlier this year after the publication rejected a cartoon she submitted.
Telnaes won her first Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 2001 and her second this past May “for delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity — and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years,” the Pulitzer Prizes said.
In addition to her Pulitzer recognition, Telnaes has published three books, and her print work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in 2004. She is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and a member of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS).
Telnaes was awarded the NCS Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2016 and the international EWK Award, named after the famous Swedish political cartoonist Ewert Karlsson, in 2021. Telnaes’ other honors include the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning (2023), the NCS Reuben division award for Editorial Cartoons (2016) and the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Award (2006).
She attended California Institute of the Arts, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in character animation. Prior to her work as an editorial cartoonist, Telnaes worked as a designer for Walt Disney Imagineering and has animated for studios in Los Angeles, New York, London and Taiwan.
The Joe Creason Lecture in Journalism is an annual lecture delivered by a nationally prominent journalist in a series that honors the memory of Joe Creason, an outstanding Kentucky journalist and an honored UK alumnus. The lecture series was made possible through a matching grant from the Bingham Enterprises Foundation of Kentucky and gifts donated by UK alumni and friends of Joe Creason. The Joe Creason Lecture Series Fund was established in 1975.