Anna Li

Anna Li is a narrative-focused illustrator from Nashville, Tennessee. Her work blends graphic shape language with a digital papercraft, textured aesthetic to create worlds that feel both strange and familiar. Whether it’s a desolate journey or food simply going down the wrong pipe, Anna is inspired by stories that take on shared human experiences and struggles, applying her own introspective and playful narrative style.

Gut Feelings
Have you ever felt backed up, things not working as they should be? This zine uses the body as a metaphorical landscape and world that mirrors our own, where sometimes it only takes one thing, one stressor, for everything to go all wrong and spill out. What happens to stress when we don’t digest it, and what does regulation look like when we finally do?

This vertical accordion zine reads from top to bottom, mirroring the digestive tract’s downward journey.

Visual Adaptation of Fifteen Dogs 

A mock choose-your-own-story game concept. Based on the philosophical and allegorical novel Fifteen Dogs by Canadian writer André Alexis, this work explores themes of existentialism, happiness, life, and death through the moral choices of fifteen canine characters granted human consciousness and intelligence. 

This concept allows the story to unfold uniquely through each character’s perspective and lifespan, forcing players to make decisions with further moral implications down the line. 

With the whole story set in Toronto, the illustrations are a nod to the author’s deep love for the city and its surrounding culture.

The Road 

An adaptation of The Road by Cormac McCarthy into a series of interior book illustrations with a front and back cover that reframe the story’s unforgiving, post-apocalyptic world through a more hopeful lens. Illustrations emphasize the enduring bond between father and son, emotional ambiguity, and the cyclical nature of the journey as an act of resilience and redemption.

Barthollow Fork Branch

Illustrations for a children’s book concept about what happens in the shadows at the secluded woods and narrow roads of Barthollow Fork Branch and its mysterious and interesting hodgepodge of residents.

The Job at the End of the World

Cover and spot illustrations for the short story “The Job at the End of the World” by Ray Naylor, which focuses on the emotional burnout and weariness of a “resilience worker” in a world defined by environmental collapse and uncertain climate crisis.