Mona Chalabi (presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures)

Ten Lives is a visually striking exploration of money—and the lack of it—in America, told through the lives of ten individuals, from Pulitzer Prize–winning data journalist and artist Mona Chalabi.
Q&A with Tessa Hulls.
Anna has a comfortable life in a mansion in Maine thanks to her husband (well, his parents, really) until he suddenly asks for a divorce. In Arizona, Hunter is a U.S. veteran, feeling ashamed about claiming disability benefits. Then there’s Levi, who is trying to pay off his debts from a gambling addiction, one social media video at a time. And Christian, stifled by his job at an Amazon warehouse before a union-organizing effort offers a way out for his comrades and his young kids. Ten people, ten different incomes, all of them afraid for their futures.
For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?
Interweaving her own story with those of her interviewees and illustrated throughout with the data visualizations for which Chalabi is renowned, Ten Lives asks how much wealth it takes to be safe in the United States. It explores how difficult it is for us to be honest and open about what we have and argues that until we get better at it, we will never be able to address the underlying problems that drive inequality and insecurity for us all.
Mona Chalabi is an award-winning writer and illustrator. Her work has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, an honorary fellowship at the British Science Association, an Emmy nomination, a fellowship from New America, and recognition from the Royal Statistical Society. In recent years, her art has been exhibited at the Tate, the Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Her writing and illustrations have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,and The Guardian.
Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. As the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants who landed in a tiny town of 350 people, she grew up with no models of how she fit within American culture. Her family didn’t have TV and the internet didn’t yet exist, so she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills with a backpack full of books (she still does this). This fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice.
Her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book, the Libby Award (as in the beloved library app, as voted on by the nation’s librarians—which holds a special place in Tessa’s heart) for best graphic novel, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for memoir, which marks the first time in its 90-year history that the award has honored a graphic novel. Feeding Ghosts was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. In spite of all this, she is still completely sure she is never making another book.
Tickets are available for in-person attendance or streaming options – starting at $10 for Pay What You Can!