Emily Damstra

Emily Damstra never set out to design money. Since 2000 she has worked as a freelance science illustrator — the artist who draws the beetle, the fossil, the songbird with enough precision that a textbook can stand behind it. She studied drawing and illustration at Alma College in Michigan, then earned a Master of Fine Arts in science illustration from the University of Michigan. Hundreds of natural-history subjects came before her first coin.

Coins arrived through a side door. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Damstra began designing for the Royal Canadian Mint in 2010, and after the U.S. Mint put out a "Call for Artists," she joined its Artistic Infusion Program — the Mint's roster of outside designers — in 2014. The crossover suited her. A coin is a tiny, exacting canvas, much like an illustration that has to read clearly at the size of a fingernail. Working from her studio in Guelph, Ontario, she has since produced more than forty coin and medal designs across both mints, and even a set of postage stamps for the United Nations.

One thing to be clear about: at the U.S. Mint, a designer draws the image, and a staff sculptor-engraver turns that drawing into the raised relief — the three-dimensional model — that gets struck into metal. Damstra is the one who decides what the coin should say. That blend — a naturalist's eye for clean line, a storyteller's instinct for a single legible image — is why her work tends to land emotionally even at coin scale.

Her most-seen design is the back of the American Silver Eagle. From 1986 the reverse — the tails side — carried John Mercanti's heraldic eagle, a stiff coat-of-arms bird, unchanged for a generation. In 2021 the Mint went looking for a replacement, and Damstra's answer was an eagle in motion: wings spread, talons closing on an oak branch as it comes in to land at its nest. She wanted to show the national bird in a way that read as diligence, cooperation, care, and protection rather than heraldry. Collectors call it the "Type 2" reverse, and it now rides on one of the most widely held silver coins on earth. The Mint's Michael Gaudioso sculpted it.

Her commemoratives show the same instinct: find the one human image that carries the whole story. For Boys Town's centennial she did something rare — she designed both sides as a single arc. The front shows a lonely girl gazing up into an oak tree, the empty space around her doing the emotional work; the back shows five children, that same girl among them, walking hand in hand under the tree's sheltering canopy. The motto even runs across both faces: "When you help a child today… you write the history of tomorrow." U.S. Mint Chief Engraver Joseph Menna sculpted it, and in 2019 the coin was named Most Inspirational Coin at the Coin of the Year awards in Berlin.

She works toward that single gesture and lets it speak. Of the Maya Angelou quarter, she said the bird in flight and the rising sun behind the writer were "imagery that she incorporated in her own writing." The bird isn't generic — it's a purple martin, a songbird native to Arkansas, where Angelou spent much of her childhood, standing in for the free bird of her most famous poem. Read the subject deeply, then trust one clear picture to carry it. That is the method behind all of it.