Ben Katchor is an illustrator and teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His comic-strip Hotel & Farm appears weekly in the Forward and other newspapers. He also produces a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine. Katchor was the recipient of a 1995 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1999, he wrote the libretto and designed the scenery for the Obie Award- winning opera The Carbon Copy Building. Four collections of his strips have been published: Cheap Novelties, The Pleasures of Urban Decay; Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories; The Jew of New York, and most recently, The Beauty Supply District.

Katchor was the inaugural Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in Visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin. This fellowship was established to reflect Guna Mundheim’s achievement as a painter, a teacher of painting (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Arts League) and as a substantial participant in institutions that nurture the arts (the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Latvian Artists’ Association, TILTS).