About me

(You can email me at mail(at)betsystreeter(dot)com)

(I’m on BlueSky as @betsystreeter.bsky.social)

The Short Bio:

Betsy Streeter is a cartoonist, animator, illustrator, and writer, and a native of the San Francisco East Bay.

From the time she drew on her furniture with her mom’s mascara, to when she worked in film production and design and video games, to her syndicated single-panel cartoon feature “Brainwaves” and comic “Sloth and Manatee,” and in her animated short films, Betsy has seen the world as a place where characters meet each other and where everything is bumping about and changing, coming apart and back together again in beautiful and ridiculous ways.

One of her cartoons is taped to the wall on the set of Paul Giamatti’s character’s office in the movie “San Andreas” starring The Rock, and another is part of a traveling Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory exhibit on black holes.

The Longer Bio:

I grew up in a town with a national lab and a lot of rocket scientists and wineries and music and bike paths.

I’ve spent time slinging pizzas, painting sets, answering phones when that was a thing you could get paid to do, storyboarding, making motion graphics, designing for print and web and things called “knowledge-bases” and generally navigating Corporate America in the software and design and video game industries. In college I studied painting and drawing with Nathan Oliveira (printmaking and monotype) and Frank Lobdell (who told me to “slow the brush down”) and communication (documentary film and journalism), where I learned to edit film by hand, another thing you could get paid to do.

My earliest roots were in film and video production, in a tiny company in the North end of San Jose, Ca. There I painted sets, made storyboards, rigged up a special effect using surgical tubing and dry ice, assisted with script and camera, and edited on-screen graphics, which became the seed of my love of making things move around and do things on-screen.

I placed my first cartoons with King Features’ The New Breed feature, which was syndicated in (paper!) newspapers all over the USA, so I went around getting all the papers out of the newspaper machines that could be found on sidewalks in most every town, often right near phone booths, which were also a thing then.

I’m very grateful to the many people who have published my work over the years, especially The Funny Times.

One of my cartoons is taped to the cabinet in Paul Giamatti’s character’s office in the movie San Andreas starring The Rock. It’s this one:

Another cartoon travels around with the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory’s exhibit on black holes, that’s this one:

During the Covid pandemic I created Sloth and Manatee and taught myself how to tattoo and tattooed myself and one of my kids.

I have collaborated with wonderful friends like Grant Petersen at Rivendell Bicycle Works on the book Bicycle Sentences and Mike Monteiro on the book Sofa Stories. I’ve illustrated for Margo Stern in her book Good Job and for Jonathan Weber for his book City on the Edge, and for Karen Wickre to promote her book Taking the Work out of Networking, among many others, and again I’m grateful for all of these people and their work.

These days I can usually be found making art with kids or creating animated short films, often set to the music of Trimmo. I’m still in the East Bay.