Istvan Banyai received his BFA from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design

Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design

The Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design , former Hungarian University of Arts and Design, is located in Budapest, Hungary. The university is committed to training traditional artist-craftsmen, as well as architects, designers and visual communication designers...

, Budapest and gained prominence as a commercial illustrator

Illustrator

An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...

 and animator

Animator

An animator is an artist who creates multiple images that give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence; the images are called frames and key frames. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, video games, and the internet. Usually, an...

 in the mid-1980s when he emigrated to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

In 1995 Banyai produced his first wordless children's book, Zoom. Honored as one of the best children's books of the year by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

, Zoom was soon published in 18 languages. He went on to author four more books and illustrate many more in collaboration with other writers and poets. "It's refreshing to encounter a group of virtually wordless books that invite children to consider their world from a point of view they may not have otherwise considered. The most stunning is Zoom, written—or, rather, imagined and then illustrated—by Istvan Banyai."

While he continues to produce commercial illustrations for publications such as The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, Playboy

Playboy

Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

, Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

, Time

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

and Atlantic Monthly; cover art for Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

 and Verve Records

Verve Records

Verve Records is an American jazz record label now owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded by Norman Granz in 1956, absorbing the catalogues of his earlier labels, Clef Records and Norgran Records , and material which had been licensed to Mercury previously.-Jazz and folk origins:The Verve...

; and animated short films for Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon (TV channel)

Nickelodeon, often simply called Nick and originally named Pinwheel, is an American children's channel owned by MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom International. The channel is primarily aimed at children ages 7–17, with the exception of their weekday morning program block aimed at preschoolers...

 and MTV Europe

MTV Europe

MTV Europe is a pan-European 24-hour entertainment cable and digital television network launched on August 1, 1987. Initially, the channel served all regions within Europe being one of the very few channels that targeted the entire European continent...

, he is internationally respected for his unique philosophical and iconoclastic vision, thus transcending the status of commercial illustrator to gifted artist. Banyai describes his art as "an organic combination of turn-of-the-century Viennese retro, interjected with American pop, some European absurdity added for flavor, served on a cartoon-style color palette... no social realism added."

Having moved from Budapest to live in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

, and Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, Banyai now lives with his wife in rural Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

.

Books

• Zoom (New York: Viking, 1995)
• Re-Zoom (New York: Penguin Group, 1998)
• REM: Rapid Eye Movement (New York: Viking, 1998)
• Delzell, Tom. The Slang of Sin (Merriam Webster, 1998)
• Sandburg, Carl. Poems for Children: Nowhere near Old Enough to Vote (Random House, 1999)
• Minus Equals Plus introduction by Kurt Andersen (New York: Abrams, 2001)
• The Other Side (Chronicle Books, 2005)
• Wiedemann, Julius, ed.Illustration Now! (Köln: Taschen, 2005)
• Park, Linda Sue. Tap Dancing on the Roof (Clarion Books, 2007)
• Steven Heller, Seymour Chwast. "Illustration, A Visual History" (New York: Abrams, 2008)

Awards

• Ten Best Books of the Year, New York Times Book Review,1995
• International Reading Association (IRA) Children's Choices Award,1997
• Publishers's Weekly, Best Books, 1995
• American Illustration Cover,No18, November 1999
• "Professor Emeritus", Moholy Nagy Academy of Art, Budapest, 2005
• The Society of illustrators,Best illustrated childrenbook, "The Other Side", Gold Medal, 2007
• 3x3, magazine of contemporary illustration, Silver Medal, 2008
• Notable Children’s Books, Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children.

Articles

• Mark Vallen, "Illustrating War," Foreign Policy in Focus, March 18, 2009
• Patricia McCormick, "All Things Considered" November 12, 1995, New York Times
• Sean Kelly, "Spring Children's Books: Stuff and Nonsense" May 16, 1999, New York Times
• School Library Journal
• Step Inside Design
• "Hungary: an open book"

Exhibitions

• "Artists Against The War," Society of Illustrators, New York, January 2008
• "Illuminare" Design Week Budapest. Hungary, 2005
• Wordless book Festival, Kyoto, Japan, 2005
• “America Illustrated” or the Best Contemporary American Illustrators, Teatrio association together with the Italian Foreign Affairs Department and the Embassy of the United States of America. Catalogue Cover Art, Published by Associazione Culturale Teatrio. Italy, 2000
• Eastern European illustrators for the New York Times "Op-Ed". SVA, New York, 1998