Email: mail(at)betsystreeter(dot)com
Betsy grew up and lives in the San Francisco East Bay in California, USA.
She is the creator of Brainwaves, a widely-published and syndicated single-panel cartoon feature, and Sloth and Manatee, an ongoing meditative comic. She sends out an email on Saturday mornings with comics and art and friendship. She has published, traditionally and independently, multiple novels and illustrated books and art collections. She draws with kids a lot and teaches through the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, CA.
Betsy has had a variety of past lives: Slinging pizzas, painting sets, answering phones (badly, so badly she asked a guy how to spell his name, and his name was ‘Ed’), developing a training program featuring a bear with no clothes and no gender, building “knowledge-bases” in the days before dynamic web pages or any of that whatnot, sitting in board rooms while executives asserted their dominance, IPOs, mergers, acquisitions, being-aquired-s, ‘user-group conference’ boondoggles, now-obsolete computer systems (iOmega!), mis-use of PowerPoint, and un-stylish business attire.
One of her cartoons is taped to the cabinet in Paul Giamatti’s character’s office in the movie San Andreas starring The Rock. Another one travels around with the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory’s exhibit on black holes. At one point Betsy taught herself how to tattoo and has so far inked herself and one of her kids. Other better tattoo artists have put her work onto other human people as well.
Betsy grew up in an East Bay way, rooting for the Raiders and the A’s and Ray Guy and Kenny Stabler and Hendu and Dave Stewart and Jim Plunkett and the San Jose Earthquakes (and for a while the Stompers) and World Team Tennis. She played all the sports because apparently she was quite hyper.
Betsy’s hometown was/is the semi-rural site of a national laboratory, so the adults around were chemists or biologists and sometimes rocket scientists – and/or, ranchers or vintners. They were musicians and photographers and artists as well. Scientists do a lot of art and vice versa.
As a kid Betsy was obsessed with the Painting section in her parents’ encyclopedia, which had a color plate of Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. She loved the covers of science fiction and fantasy novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Asimov and others. She gravitated toward Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer, record album covers at Tower and Rasputin and Amoeba and any other record store, street art, Indigenous American art, and basically all narrative art.
Betsy’s parents had a theater company with their friends in a one-room schoolhouse that burned down in the 70s. Her mom acted and directed and sang soprano and her dad acted and played trombone or piano and built sets and did lighting. Her dad also played the piano for hours every day – Chopin, Schubert, Scriabin, Beethoven, and Bach, mostly. The small-ish living room was the site of an endless progression of rehearsals and performances.
Betsy did high school FORTRAN homework on a Cray her dad used for work (considered a supercomputer at the time, these days’ it’s probably an iPhone) by way of a teletype with tractor-feed paper. She would visit the Lab on Family Day (where her dad worked as a systems programmer), and was enthralled with a role-play game running on a teletype sitting in the hallway. The computer room full of donut-shaped Crays was used to film scenes in the movie, Tron.
In college Betsy studied painting and drawing with Nathan Oliveira (printmaking and monotype) and Frank Lobdell (who told her to “slow the brush down”) and Communication (documentary film and journalism, where she learned to edit film by hand). If you weren’t a “techie” – pre-med or pre-law or an engineer – you were “a fuzzy” or just lacked direction in general so that was her.
Like many people she got into drawing cartoons on paper placemats at restaurants. That evolved into Brainwaves, a single-panel feature that grew to over 2,000 panels that travel the world in many forms such as wall paintings and psychology textbooks and a tennis water bottle.
She collaborates with friends like Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works on books, the first of which is Bicycle Sentences. There’s also an illustrated history of the American bicycle lurking about.
Betsy teaches art to kids of all grades, and gets at least as much out of it, if not more, than the kids do.
“This is a donut.” – David Lynch
A Selection of Clients/Publications
The Funny Times
Utne Reader
Body + Soul Magazine (a Martha Stewart publication)
Coaching Sanctuary
For Women First Magazine
Z Magazine (cover, double issue)
Universal Press
Wiley Publishing
Thomson Learning
Henry Stewart Talks
Daily Press, Newport News Virginia
Utah Statesman, Utah State University
The Lamoni Chronicle, Lamoni, Iowa
The Rake, Minneapolis, Minnesota
She Shines (YWCA), Rhode Island
Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory Exhibit, “Black Holes and Time Twists”
Mommy Tracked
Oxford University
Cambridge
Stanford University Press
Deloitte
T-Mobile