Kevin Kallaugher (born March 23, 1955, Norwalk, Connecticut) is a political cartoonist for The Economist and the former cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun. He is known as KAL at The Economist.
Kallaugher graduated from Harvard College with honors in Visual and Environmental Studies in 1977. He then embarked on a bicycle tour of the British Isles, where he joined the Brighton Bears Basketball Club as a player and coach. After the club hit financial difficulties, Kallaugher drew caricatures of tourists in Trafalgar Square and on Brighton Pier. In March 1978, The Economist recruited him to become their first resident cartoonist in their then 135-year history.
A picture of Indira Gandhi by Kal ( seen here on the right side) was considered offensive by Indian authorities in 1984, leading to the destruction of the printed editions of the newspaper in the country.
Kallaugher spent the next 10 years working in London as a cartoonist for such publications as The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, Today and The Mail on Sunday.
Kallaugher returned to the U.S. in 1988 to join The Baltimore Sun as its editorial cartoonist. Over the course of his 17 years at the newspaper, he drew over 4000 cartoons for The Sun while continuing to draw two cartoons per week for The Economist. Kallaugher's work for The Economist includes over 120 illustrated covers.
In 1995, Kallaugher was invited by the Walters Art Museum to help curate the celebrated exhibit "Worth a Thousand Words: A Picture of Contemporary Political Satire". In 2006, the Walters mounted a major retrospective exhibition of Kallaugher's cartoons titled "Mightier than The Sword; The Satirical Pen of KAL". Kallaugher's work has also been exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He has had one-man exhibitions in London, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
KAL's work for The Sun and The Economist has appeared in more than 100 publications worldwide, including Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Pravda, Krokodil, Daily Yomiuri, The Australian, The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. His cartoons are distributed worldwide by Cartoonarts International and the New York Times Syndicate.
Kallaugher has won many awards for his work including the 2005 Nast Prize as presented by the town of Landau, Germany. In 2004 he won the Gillray Goblet for Cartoon of the Year as presented by the Political Cartoon Society of Great Britain. In 1999, 2002 and 2005 he won the Thomas Nast Award presented by the Overseas Press Club of America, and in 2002 he was awarded the Berryman award presented by the National Press Foundation. In 1996 he won the Grafica Internazionale Award at the International Festival of Satire in Pisa, Italy. In 1990 he was awarded the award for Best Editorial Cartoon at the Witty World International Cartoon Festival in Budapest, Hungary and the 1982 Feature Cartoonist of the Year Award as presented by the Cartoonist Club Of Great Britain.
In 1999, The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons said of him: "Commanding a masterful style, Kallaugher stands among the premier caricaturists of the (twentieth) century."
Kallaugher is past President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and Cartoons Rights Network, an international human rights organization dedicate to the plight of cartoonists at risk.
Kallaugher published a collection of his Economist drawings entitled Drawn from The Economist (1988) and four collections of his Baltimore Sun cartoons entitled KALtoons (1992), KAL Draws a Crowd (1996) and KAL Draws the Line (2000). A new collection, KAL Draws Criticism, was published in June 2006.
In February 2010 KAL launched his first iPhone app iKal Book, which is based on his most recent cartoon collection KAL Draws Criticism, but with an additional bonus section.
As part of his senior thesis at Harvard, Kallaugher completed a 13 minute animated film "In The Days of Disgustus" which featured characters from his weekly cartoon strip by the same name that ran in The Harvard Crimson. In 1986, Kallaugher worked with the animator Richard Williams to produce "No Bias", an award winning 30 second television commercial for the Today newspaper in Great Britain. In 2004 Kallaugher teamed up with animator Gary Leib at Twinkle studio to create flash animation video for ABC's Nightline and CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight.
In 2006, Kallaugher was named Artist-in-Residence at the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. With the IRC, Kallaugher has pioneered the development of 3D digital caricatures that can be animated in Real-time. His first character, The Digital Dubya, made its world premier at a live press conference at the Walters Art Museum in June 2006. The World Wide Web premier of his digital animation was in March 2007 when The Economist commissioned a web video to coincide with the launch of a gallery of KAL's cartoons on the magazine's website.
Kallaugher launched a Maryland-based animation company, Kaltoons LLC, in 2007. Kaltoons first video, "Dancin' Dubya" was released online in August 2007.?
