Kaitlin Brito

Kaitlin Brito is a Peruvian-American illustrator based in New Jersey. She makes, in her own words, images with a “sparkle”: careful line, bright flat colour, a playful nostalgia that finds whimsy in the mundane. She will animate the same pictures when a job allows it. When she is not drawing she is at estate sales, building collages from her camera roll, or making a sandwich out of whatever is in the kitchen.

She studied at the School of Visual Arts from 2018 to 2022, held a Silas Rhodes Scholarship, showed in the senior exhibition at SVA Chelsea Gallery, and won the Society of Illustrators Student Competition more than once. Since then the professional list has grown in public: Society of Illustrators 66 and 67 annual winner, American Illustration 43 selected winner, a place on the Washington Post’s favourite illustrations of 2023, Best in Show at AIGA Locally Sourced in 2022. Clients she names herself include Google, Disney, Pinterest, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, New York Magazine, the Strategist, Wirecutter, Buzzfeed News, TASTE and Visual Arts Press.

A July 2026 interview with Creative Boom fills in the desk. She draws with a black ink pen so she cannot undo her way into a fake polish. “If I give myself a pencil, I’ll redraw and erase something a million times,” she said. Line came first, even as a child; colour arrived slowly at college and then became equal. She protects what she calls “pure making” — drawing breakfast if the idea arrives — because it keeps paid work from turning into a different person. For NPR she turned an article about beans in a strained economy into a superhero comic of bursting cans and a flexing bean. Vintage 1950s–70s reference comes from objects she actually owns: a porcelain pig, an apple bell, trinkets photographed in antique shops. Digitally, she picks a brush with no smoothing and tries not to redraw a line more than once.

Success, she told Creative Boom, has lately looked simple: waking up every day and drawing. That is the door. The sparkle is already on.