Data is a collection of values – numbers, facts, statistics – that shape the way we understand the world. It describes quantity and quality, measures and margins. But in its rawest form data is heavy, often buried in spreadsheets, and for many people it can be alienating or incomprehensible.
Mona Chalabi sees data differently. The British data journalist, illustrator and writer has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, translating weighty and often uncomfortable statistics into engaging hand-drawn visualisations. They might appear as illustrations, essays or animations, or even as an internet radio show, covering topics such as immigration, gun control or her determined efforts to highlight the biases in reporting on Palestine. “I think of a dataset as a grouped set of experiences,” she says. A single fact – the height of a tree, for example – isn’t inherently interesting. But compare it to other trees, track how it’s changed over time, consider its environment, and suddenly, there’s a story. “The story is always in the dataset somehow.”
Born in Britain to parents who came to east London from Iraq, but now living in Brooklyn, Chalabi was an academic child with an ability to draw. “I was quite a serious kid”, she says. “I always knew that I wanted to be able to support myself and I was very aware of that. Like a lot of immigrant families, we never went to museums. But art was present in totally different ways, even if it was just someone saying in the supermarket, ‘Doesn’t that packet look nice?’”
She studied International Relations at the University of Edinburgh then went to Sciences Po in Paris to do a master’s degree in International Security. She worked at the Bank of England, the Economist Intelligence Unit and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). At IOM, her role was monitoring and evaluation. She looked at statistics such as the number of refugees and displaced people. She saw first-hand how the way questions were framed shaped the answers, and how that limited the real-world impact of the findings. “We were going out with questionnaires and saying to people, ‘Do you need food or blankets?’ But what they actually needed were electricity generators,” says Chalabi. “That wasn’t one of the questions, so we weren’t able to meet people’s needs.” The gap between data and reality was stark. “Very early on in my career, I became a big believer in this idea that a bigger audience can mean more accurate information.”
It was after moving to the US in 2014 to work at the data-driven news website FiveThirtyEight that she began to embrace a more personal, hand-drawn approach. One of her earliest visualisations examined The Woman’s Dress for Success Book (1978), a book that made the dubious claim that women with short hair were more likely to succeed professionally. “It was really problematic”, she says. “It talked about what hairstyles women should wear if they wanted to be employed. So we fact-checked it – looked at Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women and tried to see if they really did all have short hair.” The results showed a notable presence of short-haired women, but the analysis was as much an exercise in satire as it was in journalism – a way of exposing the arbitrary rules imposed on women in professional spaces.
In the earlier years of her career, she created light-hearted hand-drawn visualisations on topics including the prevalence of supernumerary nipples and the frequency of bodily functions such as sneezing and yawning. As time went on, her subject matter became more serious. In 2020 she visualised a demographic breakdown of 100 New Yorkers, displayed at the Westfield World Trade Center, representing how 68 per cent of the city’s inhabitants were people of colour. In 2023, Chalabi won a Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary for her New York Times Magazine piece 9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth. She broke down the Amazon founder’s fortune into relatable comparisons: one illustration shows stacks of cash towering over the Empire State Building, another reimagines his wealth as a dinner plate overflowing with a grotesquely large portion compared to the meagre meals of the average worker. She used the award ceremony to call out fellow journalists for their position on Palestine, and donated her $15,000 prize to the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate to address the prominence given to Israeli voices over Palestinian ones.
“I used to really love doing silly things, but it feels like there's so little space for that now,” she admits.
Chalabi’s most recent data visualisations, which are often simple yet devastating, depict the sheer scale of death, displacement and destruction with a clarity that traditional journalism sometimes fails to capture. In her piece The Story of Gaza's Destruction in 100 Lives, Chalabi distilled the experiences of Gaza's 2.2 million residents into 100 individuals, illustrating the impact of the conflict on the population. Each person represented a specific aspect of the crisis, such as the number of deaths, injuries or displaced individuals, providing a humanised perspective on the statistics. In another work, Chalabi examined the media's portrayal of the war in Palestine, highlighting the language used to describe casualties. She noted that Israelis were more likely to be described as “murdered”, “massacred” or “slaughtered”, while Palestinians were often referred to as “killed” or “died”, pointing to a disparity in the emotional weight conveyed by the media.
The process of creating one of these visualisations is painstaking. If she’s working on a topic she’s covered before, she knows where to find and verify her data – settler attacks in the West Bank, for example, can be sourced from the United Nations or B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
For new subjects, she has to build trust in sources from scratch. "It’s a huge amount of work just to figure out who is putting out information," she says. Other times, she will construct her own dataset, like she did with the business women’s hair story – ”that dataset didn’t exist,” she says. “And often I’m doing that with slightly sillier subjects.”
When it comes to fact checking, it’s a case-by-case method that involves scrutinising the source, methodology and context of the data. "With survey data, for example, anything under 1,000 respondents isn't typically reliable,” she explains. “But that threshold doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere – 1,000 people in the US is different from 1,000 people in Gaza. Government sources, despite my skepticism about the US government, have historically been reliable.”
However, there has been a big shift with tech companies such as Google now holding more granular data than governments, and their control over this information raises ethical concerns. “Google, for instance, likely knew more about COVID trends through search patterns than governments did. Yet, because their market value is tied to information control, they won’t give up that data freely,” says Chalabi.
There’s also the matter of misinformation. During our conversation, she highlighted the case of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli security forces in Gaza last January. “I’ve seen her name and her age quoted differently in different places,” says Chalabi, citing how some say six, others say five. On the anniversary of her killing, Chalabi saw a screenshot shared on social media by a writer she admired. The writer had Googled Rajab’s name and found that a sponsored page from an Israeli government affiliated-source appeared at the top, implying that Rajab was not simply a civilian victim. “It’s basically a source that’s implying she wasn’t innocent.” This search result was confirmed while we talked and it is disturbingly subtle.
Social media has completely reshaped how data is consumed and understood. People now have more immediate access to information than ever, yet the sheer volume is overwhelming and it often comes without any sources. “We’re bombarded. There’s so much to fact-check that you just can’t,” she says. Chalabi is a platform minimalist (“I only post on Instagram”) and she presents what she knows as transparently as possible. This means she can invite scrutiny rather than claiming authority. “When a chart is presented to someone, they have this really blunt choice, which is believe it or don't believe it,” she says. “I hope that the way that I present the information gives you this opportunity to ask, ‘Why did you look at this period of time’, or ‘Why did you only look at this one group of people?’” The deliberately lo-fi sketches also give the otherwise overwhelming statistics a personable feel. “With the hand-drawn element, you can’t forget that someone made it. Automatically it feels like it’s not this perfect, computer-generated graphic.”
Recently, she’s had people message her saying they’ve left Instagram and asking if she’ll set up an account elsewhere. The growing disillusionment with Meta, algorithmic manipulation and the unchecked influence of tech billionaires – coupled with revelations about Instagram’s impact on mental health – have driven many users away. “I know that I probably should [leave Instagram], but it’s just me, and it’s really, really hard.” The tension between the necessity of social media and the harm it enables is something she wrestles with daily. “There’s a lot more thought that goes into what I post now. At the start of COVID. I was putting out a piece almost every single day. And earlier in my career at The Guardian, I was doing two or three pieces a day. I don’t know how the hell I was doing it.”
Slowing down is something she’s actively working toward. “I want to be so thoughtful about what I do, be selective and just do so much less.” Her upcoming book, which is about money and slated for 2026, is an extension of this ethos – a slower, more deliberate form of storytelling that resists the pressure of the 24-hour news cycle. Yet even as she leans into this period of recalibration, Chalabi remains acutely aware of the responsibilities she carries. “I don’t see my role as deprogramming Nazis. I think it’s about helping people survive, especially the most vulnerable in this landscape.” For her, data has always been political – who has power, who doesn’t, and how it is wielded. “What information is getting gathered is in itself highly politicised,” she says. “I don’t think data is objective, and I don’t think I am ever objective. I think people trust me for the fact that I’m not pretending either of those things are true.”
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here