Born in 1970, Sophie Blackall grew up in Australia where she learned to draw on the beach with sticks, which has not altogether helped her sense of perspective.
She completed a Bachelor of Design in Sydney in 1992 with honors, which furnished her with useful Letraset, bromide and enlarger machine skills. The following few years were spent painting robotic characters for theme parks, providing the hands for a DIY television show and writing a household hints column.
Over the next several years Blackall had many exhibitions of paintings in galleries in Sydney and Melbourne.
In 2000, Blackall was seduced by New York. She has lived and worked in Brooklyn since then. Her editorial illustrations have appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Architectural Digest, Town and Country, Vogue and Gourmet, and she has animated nine tv commercials for the UK.
She has illustrated over thirty books for children, including the Ezra Jack Keats Award-winning Ruby’s Wish, Meet Wild Boars, which won a Founder’s Award from the Society of Illustrators and a BCCB Blue Ribbon Award, Pecan Pie Baby, which won a Horn Book Honor in 2011, and the New York Times bestselling series, Ivy and Bean. Big Red Lollipop, which was a New York Times Top Ten Picture Book for 2010, was recently listed by the New York Public Library among the best 100 children’s books of the past 100 years.
Blackall’s first book for adults, Missed Connections: Love, Lost & Found began as a blog – missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com – in early 2009 as a series of paintings based on real, anonymous messages posted online by lovelorn strangers. Her Missed Connections poster commissioned by the MTA Arts for Transit program was seen in subway cars all over New York City in 2012.