Anna Lustberg: Digital Diaries | Artist Interview

“New York City landscapes, emotional and physical, are a huge theme in my artwork. I live here, I'm a part of the city, and always moving.” - Anna Lustberg

Image: Evelyn Freja

Anna Lustberg grew up in a home that loved art. Her family encouraged her art making. Anna’s eyes light up when she remembers the walls in her childhood home covered with art from her family travels. She tells me that, during the early 2000s, she became invested in graphic design. “I learned how to code and customize every website and platform that I was on”, she laughs. 

If you look at Anna’s website, you may see a lot of digital illustrations. Anna confesses that her favorite medium is actually pencil on paper. After she moved to NYC to work in galleries while being involved in graphic design, she realized that she stopped illustrating. It was Instagram that got her back to it when she decided to digitize her work. Anna explained the process: first, she would sketch on paper, then, she would take a picture and put it into Photoshop where she would work on it to add color digitally. For two years, Anna would post an image a day on Instagram - that was her way of getting back into drawing as a habit. “The digital aspect was just practical. I was moving to New York, so I wanted to jump into a creative project. And it really did open doors for me. I was meeting lots of artists and different people in New York, and when they saw that I was drawing and posting all the time, it brought a lot of opportunities”.

Ice Cream in a Snowstorm, 2026, digital illustration

For her illustrations, Anna uses her old iPad. She shared that digital illustration is beneficial also because she does not have a studio, but with an iPad, she can illustrate whenever she wants and not be bound to a location. “Sketching comes more naturally on paper than on a blank iPad screen. If I'm traveling and I'm drawing, I usually just take the iPad, and sometimes it can be very hard for me to connect with it”. Anna believes her paper illustrations have a looser feeling that she personally really enjoys, but it’s also a feeling that can be completely lost in translation. She reminisced about a solo exhibition she had in 2019, where she staged a living room set up in the middle of the space with her sketchbooks left throughout for the audience to flip through. “It was really scary. It was really vulnerable”, she laughs now. “It drove home the concept. They needed to be there”.

Anna’s illustrations are full of lively characters. Anna shared that she loves writing and storytelling - and it does come through in her artworks. She shared that she is constantly exploring the themes she would like to depict in her art. Something that came up a lot in her art was the theme of sisterhood. “It's something I really enjoy, and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon”, said the artist on her friendships with women. I wondered about how she develops her ideas. “I do spend a lot of time in my head thinking about it before I sit down and execute. The execution is the easy part, to be quite honest with you. It's really the thinking through the idea”. The artist shared that it takes the most effort to plan the idea, leading her to start  sketching and playing around with the ideas without the fear of finalization.

Pizza, 2023, Digital illustration

Since she is working in many different styles, Anna oscillates when thinking about her artistic practice. She says, “ I hear a lot of feedback, and people are like, oh, it's perfect for children's books, and it really got me thinking about what kind of stories I want to tell”. There are many things Anna loves to depict, and one of them is NYC and its inhabitants. “New York City landscapes, emotional and physical, are a huge theme in my artwork. I live here, I'm a part of the city, and always moving.” The city is her muse, and she loves catching the glimpses of potential storytelling around her. Anna always loved the idea of community where stories happen and she is keen on exploring how to excel at it. This led Anna to pursue her masters degree. “15 years after I started working, I'm going back to grad school because I want to be able to try to pursue some of these other goals I've had for a long time”. Anna shared that the projects she works on while pursuing a degree are challenging and delightful, and she has gotten a lot of inspiration from the experience.

Anna shared that she would like to explore the theme of romance in her future illustrations. It is tied closely with her understanding of city life and sisterhood that are already a huge part of her art. While she often does single-panel illustrations, she is ready to explore more of a comic-book approach. Anna is considering adding more commentary from her experience in the art world, but acknowledged that she loves translating personal moments into her art the most. "It's almost like a visual diary”. Anna is also looking forward to exploring bookmaking as that is heavily connected with graphic design and storytelling. She shared that she is really interested in working on an imprint, with the help of her writer and artist friends. “It feels good to unite some of my work under a little indie publication that I would be in control of. It would just be another great way to collaborate with artists on my own terms and have real exciting projects to work on together”.

Picture Conversations, 2026, riso-printed, saddle-stitched book with mounted photographs, 9.92 x 7.75 inches folded, edition of 1

Outside of her artistic practice, Anna works in a contemporary art gallery in NYC. She works to support artists and exhibitions. Her BA in Communications still informs her artistic career and practice and remains a core of the work that she loves. “I'm using graphic design in every single aspect of everything I do all the time”. 

Anna finished the interview with a sense of fierce positivity. “Being an artist is hard. I feel like I'm always aspiring to something. I like that it's challenging. I like that it makes me really investigate, like, what am I trying to say? What do I really care about? What do I want to put out into the world? When I say it's hard, it's not a bad thing. It’s a labour of love”.

Instagram: @lustannen

Website: annalustberg.com