Nova de Hoo is a comic artist who wants to preserve the traditional elements of fun and irony in her comics, whilst also addressing social issues with care and sensitivity. She knows this is quite a difficult cocktail, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever fully get there!

She loves comics with her whole heart. Just like animation they are so incredibly concrete, and there’s no need to discuss a good comic because you don’t have to guess what it’s trying to convey, it’s just right there on the page.

As someone who is incredibly bad with abstraction and subjectivity, she loves the down-to-earth vibe that comics have. Currently she is writing a fictional story based on experiences she’s had in South Africa, hanging out with sex workers in Johannesburg and in doing so learning a bit about their struggles and dreams. In general she is drawn to feminist themes, and loves to write a little about her own experiences as a gay woman.

Judith Vanistendael (1974, Leuven) is a Dutch-speaking Belgian comics author, illustrator, and teacher in comics art. She also worked for a time as a children’s book illustrator.

Her breakthrough came in 2007 with the publication of La Jeune fille et le nègre, an autobiographical story in two volumes about the love between a young Togolese and a young Belgian. In 2012, Vanistendael published Toen David zijn stem verloor (David, women and death), whose hero is suffering from cancer and undertakes to change his life. In 2019, inspired by the character of Penelope in the Odyssey, Vanistendael delivered Les Deux Vies de Pénélope, where a doctor mother engages in humanitarian work and distances herself from her family, especially her daughter. (Wikipedia)

Octavia Roodt is a South African artist and researcher based in Belgium. A love of comics lured her away from the sunshine of her homeland to a residency in Angoulême, where she discovered an incredible range of visual storytelling and a healthy dose of culture shock. Somewhere along the way, Flanders stole her heart.

These days, she has laid her pen at the feet of a PhD at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, where she works with a brilliant multidisciplinary team at the intersection of communication sciences, health humanities, care and ecological thinking. Together, they explore how comics can help people living with dementia share stories, memories and experiences. Her work is guided by the belief that drawing can open conversations that words alone cannot.

Dragana Radanović is a Serbian comics artist, researcher, and lecturer based in Belgium. Born in Yugoslavia shortly before its dissolution, she grew up in a place whose borders changed several times without her ever leaving home. From birth to adulthood, she lived in four different countries while remaining in the same hometown. It is a peculiar kind of migration: belonging to a generation that travelled without moving, born in one country and raised in several. Nearly a decade ago, she moved to Belgium, adding another layer to a life shaped by shifting histories and ideas of belonging.

Perhaps this is why she is drawn to stories that ask difficult questions. Through comics and visual storytelling, she explores themes such as childhood, memory, war, migration, and the ways individual lives become entangled with larger social and political histories. She enjoys drawing as a way of illustrating ideas, but even more as a way of thinking through them. It is also an activity that regularly results in strange facial expressions and a complete loss of awareness of time.

Dragana completed a PhD in the Arts exploring how childhood during times of war can be approached through drawing and visual narrative. The resulting graphic novel, What Should We Tell Them?, will be published by Ça et Là later this year. During the early stages of the project, a residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême provided the time and space for the story to take shape.

Today, she is a researcher at KU Leuven, a lecturer at LUCA School of Arts, and a co-founder of Comic-Aunties (Stripotetke), an initiative supporting less visible comic artists in Serbia. When she draws, the world disappears for a while. She thinks that’s nice.