Lynda Jean Barry was born on January 2, 1956 in Richland Center, WI. Her mother Pearl Landon was a hospital janitor of Filipino and Irish ancestry who grew up in the Philippines and had previously worked as a WAVE. Her father Bob Barry was a meat cutter of Irish and Norwegian ancestry who had been in the Navy. She spent most of her childhood in a working-class racially diverse neighborhood in Seattle, where her Mother's Filipino relatives lived. Barry later described her mother as neglectful and cruel, but as a child she found solace in her loving relationship with her maternal grandmother Rosario Landon who lived with the family during parts of Barry's childhood. Barry attended Franklin High School in Seattle and then transferred to Roosevelt High School. Barry left home for Evergreen State College in 1974.
At Evergreen she first took courses with her lifelong mentor Marilyn Frasca and met her friend Matt Groening, who encouraged her to pursue cartooning. Her comics were first published in the school's University of Washington Daily newspaper in 1977. In 1979 she began publishing Ernie Pook's Comeek in the Chicago Reader. The strip combined humorous and nostalgic stories about the members of a dysfunctional working class family, reflections on the inner lives of young girls, and groundbreaking explorations of childhood trauma, abuse, and the often bleak realities of adolescence. By 1989 Barry's strip appeared weekly in more than 50 publications. It was syndicated in alternative newspapers until 2008.
Her book-length publications include: comic collections such as The Greatest of Marlys, The Freddy Stories, and Blabber, Blabber, Blabber; the illustrated coming of age novella The Good Times are Killing Me, which Barry adapted into an award-winning Off-Broadway play; the "autobifictionalography" comic collection One! Hundred! Demons!; the dark and violent illustrated novel Cruddy; and award-winning graphic novels focused on the creative process of making comics including What It Is, Picture This, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics.
In the spring term of 2012, Barry served as an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arts Institute. In 2013 she became the Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity. Her courses explore the transformative impact of drawing on self-expression, communication, and transdisciplinary research, particularly for students who do not consider themselves artists. From 2013-2018 Barry was in residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where she ran exhibitions and held events and workshops at the Image Lab. In 2014, she founded the Drawbridge program, which paired graduate students with four-year-old co-researchers in order to help them explain and understand their work by drawing. In 2016 she was chosen as the first recipient of the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. The endowment allowed Barry to hire teaching assistants and buy tools such as a scanner and copier. In 2017 she taught at the Clarion writers workshop.
