Meet Elizabeth Montague, the first African American female cartoonist to be featured in the New Yorker.

Elizabeth Montague is proving to young women everywhere that they can be the first in their fields. The 25-year-old cartoonist, just became the first African-American woman to have her illustrations featured in the legendary New Yorker magazine. Check out more of her story on this episode of "In The Know Next Gen."

Video Transcript

ELIZABETH MONTAGUE: When I was younger, I had no idea that I would be doing cartoons or art or anything for a living. How I approach cartooning and just illustration in general is that I'm going to be an expert on my experience and then try to communicate that.

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I'm Liz Montague. I'm 24 years old, and I'm a cartoonist and illustrator. I've been published in "The New Yorker" four times. I found out that I was likely the first black woman to be featured in "The New Yorker" over email.

It's an audience that I wasn't entirely used to because, I mean, I had before that just been making cartoons for myself. And then having to think about this entire global brand is a bit intimidating. It was not immediate. I must've submitted like 50 cartoons before I got one published.

So the first cartoon that was published in "The New Yorker" was the "Per my Last Email" one. And it's of two black women on a roof. There's like the bat signal, only it says, per my last email. And it says something along the lines of like we've done all we can.

I was really curious at first if I was the first black woman to have a cartoon published in "The New Yorker" because the whole reason I had reached out in the first place was because a lot of the cartoons look the same. I think diverse representation in cartooning and illustration are important, I mean, because I think it's-- unless you're from the [INAUDIBLE] communities that are missing, usually, you can't really tell that you're missing. And I think that there's a really high human cost to inaccurately portraying something.