Christina Hess

Christina Hess never trained as a coin engraver. She trained as a storyteller in pictures.

She earned her BFA in illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and spent more than two decades as a working illustrator — oils, watercolor, graphite, collage, and digital, all bent toward telling a story in a single frame for books, magazines, and private commissions. Along the way she became a teacher: she chaired the illustration department at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design (PCA&D) in Lancaster, and she now heads the illustration program at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

Her path to the Mint began with a job posting. In the summer of 2018, the U.S. Mint sent out a national call for artists for its Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) — a roster of outside artists, not Mint staff, who are invited to submit candidate designs for new coins and medals. Hess applied with sample artwork. In July 2019 the Mint announced its choices: 27 artists, chosen from a field of more than 350, and Hess was one of them. Within a year, the newcomer would land both sides of a national commemorative — something even veteran Mint artists rarely get.

Hess is an illustrator first, and her coins show it. Her instinct is narrative — her long-running personal work imagines animals as figures out of history — and that habit of compressing a whole story into one image is exactly what a commemorative coin asks for.

It helps to know how a U.S. coin actually gets made, because the credit is split. An AIP artist like Hess creates the design — the drawing, the composition, the idea. A Mint sculptor-engraver then turns that flat artwork into relief: the raised, three-dimensional surface that is cut into a hardened steel die and struck into metal. On the suffrage dollar, Hess designed both faces; Mint medallic artist Phebe Hemphill sculpted them. Hess has said she was especially honored to get the front and the back, since the two sides of a coin often come from two different hands.

What she put on the coin was compressed history. The obverse — the heads side — shows three overlapping profiles of women, each in a hat from a different era, so a single image spans the many decades the movement took to win. The figure in front wears a cloche hat in an Art Deco pattern and a button marked with 1920, the year the 19th Amendment was ratified. The reverse — the tails side — shows "2020" dropping into a ballot box drawn in that same Deco style, with "VOTES FOR WOMEN" lettered across it. One face honors the long fight; the other shows the vote itself.

She has kept designing for the Mint since. Her portrait of Native Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui — kukui-nut lei, hibiscus in her hair — went onto a 2025 Native American $1 coin, released in January 2025. And her design of astronomer Dr. Vera Rubin, whose work pointed the way to dark matter, was chosen for an American Women Quarter slated for summer 2026.