Justin Kunz: from World of Warcraft to Lady Liberty

In 2003, a twenty-nine-year-old video-game artist named Justin Kunz joined a group of outside designers the U.S. Mint had recruited to freshen up American coinage — the Artistic Infusion Program. He was one of the youngest people in the room. He was also about to spend years losing.

Kunz submitted design after design. Many reached the final round — past the Mint's own review and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. None got picked. Year after year: so close, then nothing. Frustrated, he took it to John Mercanti, the Mint's chief sculptor-engraver and the most prolific coin artist in its history.

Mercanti's reply was plain. As Kunz tells it, the engraver said "you're doing great work. You just need to keep at it." So he did. The next year the Mint selected one of his designs — the reverse of the 2008 Andrew Jackson First Spouse gold coin. The drought was over.

That one piece of advice sits behind one of the most familiar runs of modern American money. Keep submitting, keep absorbing the feedback — that stubbornness is the quiet engine behind everything that followed. By his own count, Kunz has since created dozens of numismatic designs, with at least eighteen coins and medals actually struck by the Mint in gold, platinum, silver, and bronze.

Kunz did not train as an engraver. He came up through pictures — illustration, then painting, then the strange discipline of designing in metal.

He earned a BFA in illustration from Brigham Young University and, later, an MFA in painting from the Laguna College of Art and Design. For most of the 2000s, though, his paycheck came from video games. As a senior artist at Blizzard Entertainment he built the outdoor environments of World of Warcraft — its skies, terrain, and landscapes — and did early concept work for Overwatch. Before that he worked in Disney's interactive studio.

That background shows in his coins. A coin is a tiny, crowded stage, and the heads side — the obverse — has to read in an instant: one figure, a clean silhouette, a single feeling. Kunz composes like a storyteller staging a scene, then hands it to a Mint sculptor to translate into relief — the sculpted rise and fall of the metal that catches the light. His own statement of purpose is simple: he wants "to create pictures that tell great stories with imagination, and express the extraordinary beauty I see in this world."

His best-known commission asked exactly that. For the 2015 American Liberty $100 gold coin, he says, "the task that we were given by the Mint was to portray Liberty in a modern way, a new way. What that meant, they didn't really tell us. It was open for us to interpret." He gave them a Liberty standing forward, crowned with leaves, a torch raised in one hand and the American flag in the other — courage and hope in 24-karat gold, sculpted by Mint engraver Phebe Hemphill.

Two years later he pushed further. For the 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary coin — marking the Mint's own 225 years — his Liberty appeared as a young African-American woman crowned with stars. It was the first time Liberty had been portrayed that way on a U.S. coin. The Mint unveiled the design in a live-streamed event that drew a record audience, and it sparked real debate among collectors. It also won Best Gold Coin in Krause Publications' 2019 Coin of the Year Awards — and it was the first high-relief coin the Mint ever struck with a proof finish.

Today Kunz is an associate professor of illustration at BYU, working from the foothills of Mount Timpanogos in Utah. He still designs for the Mint between his paintings and his classes — including the reverse of the 2022 Vermont snowboarding dollar, where his airborne snowboarder catches a "melon grab" against a winter skyline.