Eleanor


Eleanor, Paul, Nicky, Vinny

Son-in-law Ed, 
daughter Nicola, 
grandchildren Madeline and Paul 

With friend at the Puppetry Museum


Companion (and fierce critic) , Daphne

Meet 
Eleanor Mill

The Grand Dame of op-ed illustration grew up during the Depression, the daughter of a Buick salesman and a brilliantly talented artist-mother. They lived all over the country, including Michigan (where she was born), New Mexico, Tennessee, Illinois, and finally Maryland. By the time she graduated from high school in Rockville, Maryland, Eleanor had attended 21 different schools.  

After high school she won a scholarship to the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.  She left school after two years and worked for the summer as a caricaturist at the National Zoo until she had enough money to head to New York where she studied for a while under the Russian emigrant painter, Raphael Soyer. From there it was a job as a silkscreen artist in the garment district.

Eleanor married Aurelius Battaglia, a well-known children’s book illustrator and animated-film director with the Walt Disney Studios.  He introduced her to children’s book art and helped launch her on a career illustrating children’s books for such publishers as Random House, Albert Whitman, and Golden Press. 

After 15 years together, Eleanor and her husband separated and she and her daughter, Nicola, moved back to the legendary progressive artist’s colony of Roosevelt, New Jersey.  After Nicky graduated from high school, they moved to NYC where Nicky studied art, and Eleanor continued her work with children books.  Eventually she settled in her current home of Hartford, Connecticut, and soon sold the first of many illustrations to the Courant. 

In 1983, bolstered by her nephew and agent, Vinny Allegrini, she began self-syndicating her work across the country, and quickly became a familiar presence on America's op-ed pages.

Eleanor gathers her research from the television, often videotaping documentaries and news shows, then creating her drawings from the images she’s captured on tape.  She prefers this to still photographs because “on TV, you can see how they act—their expressions, their gestures.”

She’s received many awards for her work including a Global Award for Media Excellence from the Population Institute of the United Nations for the cartoon shown below.