ICAF 2023 Guest Artists & Speakers
University of British Columbia
April 20-22, 2023
University of British Columbia
April 20-22, 2023
Ebony Flowers is a cartoonist, ethnographer, and educator. She was born and raised in Maryland. She holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, and the Paris Review. Ebony is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient, a 2020 Ignatz Award recipient for Outstanding Graphic Novel, 2020 Believer Award recipient for Fiction, and a 2020 Eisner Award recipient for Best Short Story. She was also nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Literacy (Young Adult Fiction). Ebony is a 22-23 Radcliffe Fellow for Advanced Study. She lives in Denver, CO. Photo by Tony Rinaldo.
Susan Kirtley is Professor of English and the Director of Comics Studies at Portland State University. Her research interests include visual rhetoric and graphic narratives, and she has published pieces on comics for the popular press and academic journals. She is the author of the Eisner-winning Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass (2013), and co-editor of With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics (2020). Her book, Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips was the 2022 Charles Hatfield Prizewinner for the best book in Comics Studies.
Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst, which will be out in June. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and a critical guide to Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Meghan Parker is an artist and educator based in North Vancouver, Canada. Her recently published book, Teaching Artfully, is an autobiographical comic exploring her questions and experiences as a high school visual arts teacher. Created as a groundbreaking thesis in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Teaching Artfully argues for comics in scholarship and celebrates and advocates for the arts in education.
Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in East Africa and studied literature and history in Konstanz and Hamburg (MA). After graduating from art school (HAW), Birgit Weyhe has been working as a comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for several prizes in Germany, France and Japan. Her album "Madgermanes" received the Bertholt Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize in 2015 and in 2016 the Max-und-Moritz-Preis as best German-language comic. In 2022, she was selected as the best German comic artist.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is a contemporary artist whose wide-ranging artistic practice explores themes of identity, environmentalism and the human condition. Influenced by both Haida iconography and contemporary Asian visual culture, he has created an artistic practice that crosses diverse cultures, generations, and disciplines in search of accessibility and engagement as a counterpoint to stratification and isolation. Institutional collections include the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery.