Rebecca Hendin's powerful illustrations across politics and more for the BBC

Working across illustration, animation, cartoons, art and design, Hendin has been based in London for about a decade, having moved from her native US. She regularly works as an in-house illustrator and animator at BBC Ideas, “and can often be found lurking about Broadcasting House,” as she puts it.

Until 2018 Hendin worked full-time as an in-house editorial illustrator and designer at BuzzFeed, and previously wrote and cartooned a weekly political editorial for American left-wing website Daily Kos alongside freelance projects. Her US political cartoons are syndicated by Universal Uclick, and her cartoon work is part of the Newseum's collection in Washington, D.C.

While her work with the BBC is less explicitly politics-focused than that created at Buzzfeed, the central premise is the same: that deft communication of personality and story in a single image. It’s not an easy job: not only are you often communicating complex issues through imagery alone; the timelines on such pieces are often very tight—at Buzzfeed, sometimes as little as a few hours.

A powerful recent piece Hendin created for the BBC, is the following video short narrated by a young woman telling her experience of domestic abuse at the hand of her partner as a teenager, for BBC Newsbeat.