CARTOONIST PROFILE

Bio

Tim Menees

Biography

Tim Menees grew up in Seattle, and graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Political Science. After serving in the Air Force as a counter-intelligence officer, including two years in Turkey, he worked as a reporter and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He came to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as an editorial cartoonist in 1976.

His work has appeared in the national newspapers and newsmagazines and on network TV. He has drawn syndicated comic strips, and now writes and illustrates a weekly column for the Post-Gazette. He also writes and illustrates feature stories as he chooses, including accounts of his 24-hour visit inside Western Penitentiary and a week aboard a Great Lakes freighter, a two-part series on the arts in prison (including California’s Folsom Prison and San Quentin) and, most recently, a piece on Western Penitentiary?s final days.

He has won several local and regional awards and has placed second in the national Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Contest and in the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Awards. Before coming to Pittsburgh, he won the National Newspaper Association?s top award for weekly cartoons.

Pittsburgh?s New Works Festival, an international competition, chose his one-act play Father Figure for a seated reading, and a year later picked his children?s one-act play Rex The Mighty Hunter for a full stage production.

He is married and has a son and a daughter. Since the spring of 2003, he has taught, as a volunteer, creative writing at a nearby state penitentiary. He also paints and plays piano and accordion in a blues-zydeco band that has opened for, among others, the Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Roseanne Cash and Marcia Ball.