Library of Congress appoints Seattle-based artist as 2025 Innovator in Residence

SEATTLE — The Library of Congress appointed a Seattle-based artist as its 2025 Innovator in Residence for her popular social media series about the Seattle Fremont Bridge two years ago.

Vivian Li, a comic artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois, created a project that combined her visual and digital coding experience, according to a Tuesday press release from the Library of Congress.

Li’s project about the Seattle Fremont Bridge in 2023 inspired others who share her passion for entertainment and storytelling about local history. As a result of that inspiration, Li will continue her work for the Library of Congress as an Innovator in Residence. The program will allow her to create unique and motivational collection items that help youths find the Library of Congress’ online resources about their communities.

“With the Library of Congress so far away, I thought it surely wouldn’t have anything for me – but when I started exploring the digital collections, I found so many stories about my town!” Li said according to the press release.

“I searched for Macomb, the town I grew up in, and found a snippet from an Ohio newspaper talking about bootleggers on the run,” Li said. “This led to a string of research about what it was like during Prohibition, and I learned about a 1921 scandal where a bootlegger in the nearby town of Colchester hired disgraced Chicago ‘Black Sox’ to play as ringers in a baseball game against Macomb. I didn’t even know Macomb used to have a baseball team!”

“In my time as an innovator, I hope to be able to dig through the collections and share some of these treasured stories on social media so people might become curious to do some exploration on their own,” Li also said.

In one of her future projects, “Anywhere Adventures,” Li will create a website experience for audiences in selected U.S. cities to learn about their hometowns through items from the Library’s digital collections. The project will spotlight three cities through a website that will display a self-guided tour for each location.

Li is graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a degree in computer science. I previously worked as an artist in residence creating digital data visualizations for Seattle’s historic Fremont Bridge in a partnership between the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Seattle Department of Transportation, according to the press release.

She published the first volume of her comic cookbook on homemade Chinese cuisine, ABC Cooking, in 2023. Li has contributed comics to Papeachu Review, Fogland Press and Portland Zine Symposium, according to the press release.

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