Nicole Hollander

Nicole Hollander (born April 25, 1939) is an American cartoonist and writer. Her daily comic strip Sylvia was syndicated to newspapers nationally by Tribune Media Services and also can be seen on her blog, BadGirl Chats.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Hollander was the daughter of Shirley Mazur Garrison and Henry Garrison, a labor activist and member of the carpenters union. Growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, she was educated in Chicago public schools. She earned a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960 and an M.F.A. from Boston University in 1966. Her marriage to Hungarian sociologist Paul Hollander ended in a 1962 divorce.

During the 1970s, she was the graphic designer of a feminist publication, The Spokeswoman, where she had the opportunity to transform the newsletter into a monthly magazine. While designing pages, she occasionally added her own political illustrations. "Around 1978," she created a comic strip, The Feminist Funnies, later introducing the character who became Sylvia. Selections from The Feminist Funnies appeared as a calendar, Witches, Pigs and Fairy Godmothers: The 1978 Feminist Funnies Appointment Calendar, and in her 1979 book, I'm in Training to Be Tall and Blonde. The book's success led Field Enterprises to distribute Sylvia to newspapers as a daily comic strip starting in 1981. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hollander drew comics for Mother Jones magazine. Many of these did not include the Sylvia character.

Hollander has donated the archive of her work to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. A number of her drawings are in the collection of the Library of Congress. She is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2011 offering a course in writing the graphic novel. She has led workshops and taught at Ohio State University, Columbia College Chicago, the Ox-Bow School of Art, Chicago's Printers Row Lit Fest, and for the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Her frequent appearances as a public speaker since 2001 have occurred at The New School, Loyola University Chicago, DePaul University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Library of Congress, Stagebridge, and elsewhere. In 2009, Hollander curated a show of women's humor, And You Think This Is Funny?, for Chicago's Woman Made Gallery; the show included the work of some 50 women artists. The gallery's simultaneous ten-year retrospective exhibit of Hollander's work was titled It's Enough to Make a Cat Laugh. In 2012, Nicole Hollander's "unique collection of condom packages and sex toys" entered the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

In 2005, Hollander appeared in a one-woman show, Return to Lust, at Pegasus Players in Chicago. A second show, Plastic Surgery or a Real Good Haircut, opened in 2008 at Chicago's Live Bait Theatre. In these performances, she described her experiences as an aging woman dealing with physical vanity, sexual desire and an overlong birthday-party guest list.