Donnelly is the creator of a new digital visual journalism called live drawing. For CBS News, CNN and The New Yorker, she covered the DNC in 2016, and the 2017 Inauguration, White House Press conference, political protest marches. According to NBC News, Donnelly is “a pioneer of on-the-fly sketching of live events” wherein she quickly cartoons people and events on her tablet and immediately tweets them out, sometimes with humorous and insightful commentary on the drawing or in the tweet.

In 2016, Donnelly was the first cartoonist to be granted access on location to live draw the Academy Awards and red carpet; she returns every year as the Oscar cartoonist. Both on location and remotely, she covered presidential debates, State of The Union, The Impeachment Trial, election returns, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the BET Awards, the Tonys, the Olympics, World Cup, Superbowl, literary events, and more. Along with CBS News and The New Yorker, her clients include Fusion, The New York Times, BET, Medium, PBS, Narrative Magazine, ESPN, Stanford University, The Hindustan Times and others. Her innovative approach to reporting and commenting on events with live drawing has been covered in various publications and video profiles in Time, CBSNews.com, NBC News.com, Ad Week, USA Today, CNET, and People Magazine.