The 11th edition of Lingerie on Film is here with film by Joana Avillez, Julia Trotta, Julia von Boehm, Mina Stone, Miwa Susuda, Molly Rogers, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Quinn Wilson, Sandeep Salter, Zoe Latta, and Nell Verlaque. On the occasion of the series release, we spoke to each contributor about their taste and perspective, pulling at the thread of what colors their lives. Our fourth to share is Joana Avillez, an illustrator and author whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker and whose latest project brings her drawings to Joseph Mitchell's classic collection of New York Harbor essays, The Bottom of the Harbor.

As a child she drew mermaids. Scenes from The Borrowers — those tiny people living in the walls, making furniture from thimbles and spools. Women with uproarious outfits and long nails and tall shoes. Messy bedrooms with objects strewn everywhere. She was known, along with a few other kids, as one of the best drawers in her grade, and she moved in that lane because it felt good. There was no plan, no ambition toward a career. "I had no sense of doing this full-time and with my life," she says, "but it's truly my dream and works so well for who I am."

She notices hands first. Then shoes.

Her most recent project brings her illustration to Joseph Mitchell's The Bottom of the Harbor, a 1959 collection of six essays — each connected by water, each moving through a different world of the New York Harbor. She came to Mitchell through the writer Robert Sullivan, who suggested him after learning where she'd grown up. "Mitchell's writing is so immersive, so detailed and sweeping," she says. "Each piece haunts me and warms me. I wanted to illustrate the essays as a way to enter into his writing, to go deeper." Someone wrote to her recently describing his prose as "lapidary" — a word that stunned her with its accuracy. She hopes the illustrations will bring people to Mitchell's work, and let them experience it in a deeper way.

In the same spirit of going deeper, she and her son have been spending evenings with a collected volume of Charles Addams cartoons. "More Morticia, Mamma!" Her own cartoon allegiances are firm: everything by Liana Finck, and Sam Gross' classic snail and tape-dispenser cartoon for The New Yorker. She loves camp and humor, she says, maybe above all else — and returns to Strangers With Candy as proof. Alongside it: Agnes Varda's films, for the way Varda follows her own sense of how to explain an idea, how collage and instinct can be a method.

She sees drawing and writing as one and the same — mark-making at a table's scale, the same kind of vision, at their best when they're enmeshed. Comics. Picture books. The specificity of both.

On creativity, her advice has been on a Post-It note on her desk for more than a decade: KEEP IT SIMPLE.

"When coming up with ideas, the direct route is often the best. That doesn't mean it's easy OR obvious. But clarity of conveying your idea wins." Clarity, she's quick to add, can mean a hazy drawing; it can even mean evoking a feeling of confusion. What it means is that the person experiencing the work feels something land. The other imperative is to have fun — "if something is a true drag to make, it will never connect to anyone, including yourself." As for ritual and headspace: "Coffee and a deadline. With illustration, you don't really have the time to get into the right headspace. You just have to do it."

For a creative reset, she went to Rome this past April with her family and found herself drawing typography everywhere — gelato shop signs, the lettering stenciled on garbage cans. "The type that is woven into Italy's everyday everythingness is so beautiful and elevated and makes me completely swoon." Drawing new letters, watching lines bend and curl in ways she had never quite seen, was a reminder of how much she loves what she loves. Her other reset is in bed with Real Housewives: "my safest, warmest, most invigorating place."

Currently, she's listening to Adam Charlap-Hyman and Laura Kugel's podcast Handle With Care — ostensibly about interior design, in practice much more. "It is such a gift!" Their guests are often people who are not online, which tends to mean older, which tends to mean they have a great deal of hard-won experience to offer. "It is very intimate to get to hear these conversations," she says, "and the world is lucky they are recording them."