James McMullan

James McMullan (born June 14, 1934) is an Irish-Canadian illustrator and designer of theatrical posters.

Born in Tsingtao in the Republic of China, where his grandparents had emigrated to from Ireland as missionaries for the Anglican Church, he and his mother fled to Canada at the onset of World War II. In 1944, he enrolled at St. Paul's Boarding School in Darjeeling, India. After his father was killed in a plane crash, he joined his mother in Shanghai, and the two relocated to Vancouver Island, where he completed his high school education.

When McMullan was 17, he and his mother emigrated to the United States, where he studied for a year at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. He joined the United States Army and served at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where he drew diagrams of where to position propaganda loudspeakers on Sherman tanks.

In 1955, McMullan moved to New York City to continue his art education at Pratt Institute. While studying there he supported himself by illustrating book jackets for authors such as Lawrence Durrell and Jorge Luis Borges. He also did magazine illustrations for Esquire and Sports Illustrated, among others. In 1966, he joined the Push Pin Studios design firm, working alongside Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel. many of which are included in the 1998 book The Theater Posters of James McMullan. He won a Drama Desk Special Award for his consistently inspired artwork for the theater in 1991. André Bishop, the artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater, has written than "McMullan manages to capture le moment précis of each play, and he does it well in advance of ever having seen the production." In 2022, he published a book of portraits called Hello World: The Body Speaks in the Drawings of Men.