Christina Hess

Christina Hess did not come up through the Mint's engraving rooms. She came up through publishing — a working illustrator for more than twenty years, painting and drawing for books, magazines, and private commissions, and teaching the next generation how to do the same.

She earned her BFA in illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, then built a career around visual storytelling — traditional oils and collage mixed with digital work. Along the way she became a teacher: part-time at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design (PCA&D) in Lancaster from 2005, and eventually chair of its illustration department. She later went on to head the illustration program at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

Then, in the late 2010s, the U.S. Mint put out an open call. The Mint runs something called the Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) — a roster of outside artists, not Mint staff, who get invited to submit designs for new coins and medals. Hess applied, uploading her work and answering the Mint's questions. She was chosen — one of just 27 artists picked from more than 350 who applied. As she later put it: "You really can never know what may resonate with people unless you give it a shot."

Hess is an illustrator first, and it shows in her coins. She thinks in narrative and portrait — her long-running personal series imagines animals as figures from history — and that instinct for telling a whole story in one frame is exactly what a commemorative coin demands.

Here it helps to know how a U.S. coin actually gets made. 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 gets cut into a steel die and struck into metal. On the suffrage dollar, Hess designed both sides; Mint medallic artist Phebe Hemphill sculpted them.

What Hess put on the coin was a piece of compressed history. The obverse — the heads side — shows three overlapping profiles of women, each in a hat from a different era, so that the single image spans the many decades the suffrage movement took to win. The reverse — the tails side — drops "2020" into a ballot box, drawn in the Art Deco style of the period, with "VOTES FOR WOMEN" lettered across the front. One face of the coin 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 appeared on a Native American $1 coin released in early 2025, and her design of astronomer Dr. Vera Rubin — whose work pointed toward dark matter — was selected for a 2026 American Women Quarter.