Efdot (Eric Friedensohn) does not draw cities as they look. He draws them as they move. Working with a vocabulary of lines, dots, and glyphs, he turns streets, intersections, and the rhythms of urban life into maps of motion and memory. His compositions begin through improvisation: one mark leads to another until the image settles, a process he calls a “moving meditation.” Underneath that spontaneity is a longstanding interest in ancient writing systems and a central idea in his practice: that marks can carry meaning before words do.

Born in 1990 and raised in Westchester, New York, Efdot’s visual language was shaped by his grandmother’s stained-glass practice, skateboard culture, his father’s record covers, and, later, his studies in Graphic Design and Product Design at Drexel University. Twenty years of skateboarding taught him to read cities through movement, while time spent living and working across Latin America introduced colors, forms, and environments that pushed his work further toward abstraction. Those influences eventually converged in the open lines style he began developing in 2019.

That language now moves across paper, canvas, walls, and screens. In Cities, marks first developed by hand become the building blocks of a generative system, recombining into imagined streets, intersections, and plazas while retaining the character of Efdot’s drawing. His murals and exhibitions have taken his work across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, while Efdot Studio has worked with Nike, Apple, Adobe, Sony, Coca-Cola, Topps, Hypebeast, the New York Knicks, the Brooklyn Nets, and the USA Olympic Skateboarding Team. He lives and works in Brooklyn.