Emily S. Damstra

Emily S. Damstra did not set out to design coins. She grew up around the Great Lakes, studied drawing and illustration at Alma College, and earned a Master of Fine Arts in science illustration from the University of Michigan — the discipline of rendering animals, plants, and natural processes with the precision a textbook or a museum demands. Since 2000 she has worked as a freelance science illustrator, putting hundreds of natural-history subjects on paper.

That eye for accurate nature is what eventually put her work in people's pockets. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Damstra began designing coins for the Royal Canadian Mint around 2010, then joined the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program in 2014. The program — call it AIP — is the Mint's roster of outside artists who submit designs alongside its in-house staff. Damstra now belongs to a small group of artists who have designed coins for two national mints at once.

It helps to know how a modern U.S. coin actually gets made, because Damstra sits on one specific side of it. A coin has two jobs split between two people: the designer, who draws the artwork, and the sculptor-engraver, who turns that drawing into the three-dimensional relief that gets cut into a steel die and struck into metal. Damstra is a designer. Her line drawings are handed to the Mint's sculptor-engravers — people like Phebe Hemphill, Renata Gordon, or Chief Engraver Joseph Menna — who give them depth.

Her illustrator's training shows. Damstra's coins tend to read cleanly, with naturalistic figures and animals that hold up under close inspection — a butterfly's wing, the posture of an eagle, the branches of an oak. She has put that approach to work across modern U.S. commemoratives, the American Innovation dollar series, and, most visibly, the new Silver Eagle. She has also designed postage stamps for the United Nations Postal Administration.

Two designs anchor her American reputation. The first is the 2018 Breast Cancer Awareness commemoratives — clad half dollar, silver dollar, and the $5 gold coin — chosen through a national public design competition. Damstra's artwork shows two women of different generations standing together, a butterfly above them; the reverse is a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly in flight, a symbol of hope. The gold coin became the first U.S. coin ever struck in "pink gold," an unusual high-copper alloy of 85% gold, 14.8% copper, and 0.2% silver — engineered to give the metal a soft rose tint without any plating or coloring. (Damstra drew the designs; Phebe Hemphill and Renata Gordon sculpted the obverse and reverse.)

The second is the American Silver Eagle. In 2021 the Mint replaced John Mercanti's heraldic-eagle reverse — in use since 1986 — with Damstra's design of an eagle coming in to land, carrying an oak branch, America's national tree. It was a rare event: a fresh hand on a coin millions of people already owned. Her earlier Boys Town Centennial silver dollar (2017) had already earned her notice, winning the "Most Inspirational Coin" honor at the 2019 Coin of the Year Awards for its image of a lone girl gazing up into an oak, answered on the reverse by a sheltering tree and a family below it.