Matt Wuerker

Matt Wuerker is a political cartoonist and illustrator based in Washington DC where he is the staff cartoonist and in house illustrator for the newspaper/website, Politico (http://www.politico.com/wuerker).

Over the past 30 years his cartoon and caricature work has been published widely in publications that range from dailies like the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor, to magazines such as Smithsonian, The Nation, and Sojourners — to name a few.

Matt is a graduate of Lewis and Clark College, class of ’79. Garry Trudeau’s commencement speech helped convince him that cartooning could be a viable career path. His first editorial cartoons (not counting ones he drew for school papers going back to the 7th grade) were published in Willamette Week, the alternative weekly in Portland in ’79.

In 2006 he was brought aboard as part of the team that launched Politico where he’s the staff cartoonist and illustrator. Politico proved to be the perfect platform to combine his political cartooning, caricature and animation work.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and again in 2010. In April, 2010 he was awarded the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning at the Library of Congress. In November of 2010 he won the Nation Press Foundation’s Berryman Award for editorial cartooning.

He is currently the Vice President of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and serves on the board of the Cartoonist Right Network International.

Asked about his fixation with drawn opinion, Matt said, “I like the usefulness of good political cartoons and imagery. There's something very satisfying about contributing to the ongoing political conversation and there's also something very satisfying when you succeed in making people laugh. Some visual metaphors are just plain serious, but the ones that I like best are the ones that combine a certain gravitas with a playfulness that gets people to smile.”

Two collections of his cartoons have been published: "Standing Tall in Deep Doo Doo: A Cartoon Chronicle of the Bush Quayle Years" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), and also "Meanwhile in Other News: A Graphic Look at Politics in the Empire of Money, Sex and Scandal" (Common Courage Press 1998).

He and his family (wife Sarah Stephens and son Owen ) moved from Oregon to Washington DC in 2000 for what they thought would be “a year abroad” but were bitten by the DC bug and gave into Potomac fever.

They now live in DC in Woodley Park, situated between the National Zoo and the Swiss Embassy. Depending on how crazy things get in Washington, they figure they can seek asylum in one or the other.