Hi, I'm Garance Coggins,

Freelance illustrator / feminist blogger / Art historian graduate / avid reader. 

My academic background comes from classical Humanities and Art History, with a strong interest for text-image relationship and issues related to art on the Web

If you're into books and drawings, check out these papers dedicated to Mervyn Peake. Mervyn Peake was an amazing British fantasy writer and illustrator whose work I have been wanting to study since I first read his book Gormenghast. Thanks to the trust and work of Peter Winnington, part of this research has been published in his review dedicated to Mervyn Peake's work, Peake's studies. Sadly, the publication has since stopped, but you can still find the papers online: 

- From Pictures to Prose: how Goya and Rembrandt contributed to the Titus Books,

- Reproducing Peake’s MS drawings: some thoughts and suggestions

If you'd rather dive into art and technology, take a look a this awesome project I've been proud to be part of: Cross Lingual Art Spaces on Wikipedia. Along with a team of international and interdisciplinary researcher, we combined Art History knowledge to digital tools to track the visual acceptances of the concept of "Art" on Wikipedia. It took place during a Summer School organized by the Digital Media Initiative of Amsterdam University. French readers, you could also be interested in this paper about 'online Museums without walls', which was published in La Revue de l'art n°182. 

Having graduated and having taken several internships abroad, I then decided to take a leap: from academia straight into the startup world.

I joined Glose.com, a Paris-based startup whose mission is to build a new kind of digital reading experience. As their Community Lead, I met with a lot of passionate readers, authors, publishers, teachers, with whom we continuously brainstormed about how the digital world could help people not only have an easier access to books, but also connect with each other and share knowledge. For more than two years, I had the pleasure to continuously experiment, with the support of the team, as I launched the social networks, blogged daily, gathered a community of 30K+ followers on Twitter, set up meetups, interviews and workshops.

After a bit more than two years, I took another leap: from startup employee to a freelancing activity. My goal was to allocate time to drawing, a long-time hobby, and to personal projects. As a Freelance illustrator, I have been thrilled and proud to work on projects such as The Scrooge Mystery. It's an independent and crowdfunded documentary about the comic artist Don Rosa, who happens to be a childhood hero of mine. For this project, I designed the visual for the poster and the lettering for the chapter titles. I also spent several months doing illustrations for Riddle Me This, a brain-teasing motion-design show produced by Jellysmack. If you're into riddles, pop-culture and puns, you'll definitely enjoy the show. 

Last but not least, in January 2018 I launched Livres de Femmes, a blog (French only) dedicated to sharing more reviews and book recommendations of books written by women. It comes with an occasional podcast (French).

If you'd like to be in touch, you can send me an email here or on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Medium. I'll be happy to hear from you!