The Incredible Women of Data Visualization
Meet just a few of the superbly talented women creating, innovating, and expanding the horizons of the field of data visualization.
In March, Tableau chose all women for the current cohort of Tableau Public Featured Authors (I am humbled to be among them), and I realized I didn’t know all of them despite my regular engagement in Tableau community initiatives and all things #DataFam on Twitter. After spending several hours diving in to their visualizations, I thought, I need to write about all the talented and brilliant women data visualization designers! I added the topic to my ever-expanding list of things to write about. When it was made public that Elon Musk would purchase Twitter and folks began to speculate about the future of the platform, I just so happened to be chatting with some folks on the Adobe Illustrator Discord server. I thought, I need to create a Discord server for women in dataviz! I finally did, yesterday, so please sign up if you’re a woman dataviz developer, enthusiast, or you’re new to the field of data visualization and are looking for mentorship and inspiration. I should also mention Tableau’s global Data + Women User Group which meets via Zoom on a regular cadence. (There are local Data + Women groups, too.)
The data visualization designers highlighted here, from all over the world, are just a handful of the amazing women in the field. I’m sure there are many I haven’t yet encountered, and I couldn’t even include all the ones I do know, so please let me know if I missed one of your favorites. I haven’t included the women in the above-linked list of Tableau Public Featured Authors because Tableau already did a great job of highlighting their accomplishments. I encourage you to visit their Tableau Public profiles when you have time.
You may have heard of the first few women on this list already, but I included them here because they were instrumental in my decisions to focus my career on data visualization and to learn Tableau.
Judit Bekker 🇭🇺
Budapest-based Judit Bekker’s work inspired me immediately. That she could take a business intelligence tool and create such beautiful, creative, and informative visualizations amazed me. At the time, I had used BI tools such as Looker, AWS QuickSight, and TIBCO Spotfire as well as Python and R charting libraries like Seaborn and ggplot2, but had never used Tableau. I was unaware of its capabilities, and Judit’s work piqued my curiousity about the software. A colleague taught me the basics of Tableau and shortly thereafter I took DataCamp’s Tableau Fundamentals skill track, and now I’ll probably never touch another BI tool. I share Judit’s love of all things David Lynch, and her viz Wild at Heart remains one of my all-time favorites.
Learn more about Judit and her work: Tableau Public | website
Wendy Shijia 🇨🇳
The inaugural #30DayChartChallenge in April 2021 happened about four months after I had started using Tableau in earnest. While I was doing my best to eke out thirty charts and check out the amazing work of the other participants, I stumbled upon Wendy’s viz My Typical Days, which led me to her Tableau Public profile where I discovered her gorgeous work with maps, quantified self topics, and masterful use of color.
Learn more about Wendy and her work: Tableau Public
Jessica Moon 🇺🇸
My pre-data analytics background is in healthcare, and most of my data analyst roles have involved healthcare data, so I love #ProjectHealthViz, the community initiative created by Lindsay Betzendahl. Data breaches are one of the most concerning challenges for healthcare organizations, healthcare consumers, and governmental and regulatory agencies. In September 2021, #ProjectHealthViz focused on the topic.
When I think of Jessica now, I think “stunning design” and “incredible attention to detail” first, but the first of her vizzes that I saw — her submission for the healthcare data breaches challenge — impressed me because of the analysis. As an analyst first, then later a dataviz practitioner, I frequently notice that sometimes folks focus so much more on the design than the analysis. As I explored the rest of Jessica’s work, I discovered one analytics gem after another, all beautifully designed. I aspire for my work to be balanced between analysis and design in the way that Jessica’s is.
Learn more about Jessica: Tableau Public | Twitter
Diana Estefanía Rubio 🇲🇽
Did you think I was only going to include dataviz developers who use Tableau? 😉
Based in Mexico City, award-winning visual information designer Diana Estefanía Rubio has created visualizations for CNN International, Turner Broadcasting, and Expansión Magazine Mexico, among many others. I discovered her work on Domestika when I saw an Instagram ad for her course Data Visualization for Editorial Projects (which I purchased, but have not worked on yet — I am still finishing up the also amazing Sonja Kuijpers’ fantastic course). Diana’s work defies dataviz conventions in many ways — she creates many circular charts, Sankey and alluvial diagrams, and uses lots of color, all things that we are encouraged to use sparingly by data visualization teachers, influencers, and experts. She’s proof that once you know the rules you can break them and that there really are no absolute “dos” and “don’ts” in data visualization. Her work is so uniquely her own.
Learn more about Diana: website | Behance | Instagram | Domestika course
Angela Morelli 🇳🇴
Angela Morelli, the cofounder and CEO of InfoDesignLab, focuses on a collaborative approach to data visualization, tackling complex scientific and social justice topics. In her presentation Communication is Participation from a 2021 CMCC climate change conference (I highly recommend you take the 22 minutes to watch it on YouTube), she describes her work with scientists, developers, and other collaborators as “design-driven” and “human-centered” and talks about the responsibility of information designers with regards to communicating data truthfully and effectively.
Learn more about Angela: Twitter
Kristin Henry 🇺🇸
My introduction to data visualization consultant, artist, and game developer Kristin Henry’s work came by way of her pandemic data project Stickers + Stamps. The stickers I received in the mail after participating in the project were so beautiful, I needed to find out more. Kristin’s Etsy shop, ArtAtomic, is stocked with treasures for the data- and science-obsessed geeks (such as myself, ahem) in your life. Her work was also my first exposure to generative art, which I started tinkering with this year. Kristin’s vast skillset inspires me to keep following all of my many interests and to consider what is possible with data outside of “traditional” dataviz (if dataviz is even old enough to have “traditional” representations).
