Erin La Cour is Associate Professor in English Literature and Visual Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder and co-director of Amsterdam Comics. Her research focuses on the intermediality and mediality of comics and on the theory and practice of graphic medicine.

She has co-edited four comics studies collections, including Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave 2022) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and Eisner Award nominated “Graphic Medicine” (Biography 2022). She is co-author of the comics Ervaringskracht (produced with Jan Cleijne, Syndikaat 2025) and Why Graphic Medicine? (produced with John Miers, Vrije University Press 2026). From 2020-2021 she was a Comenius Fellow of The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO), for which she conducted the project “Opening a Dialogue about Mental Health through Comics and Creative Writing” and from 2024-2029 she will lead her European Research Council Consolidator Grant project on Graphic Medicine, entitled “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination.”

Sabba Khan is an award-winning author who brings together visual art, architecture and storytelling into a practice that asks pertinent questions of our times. She was born and raised in Newham (UK) where she still lives and works. Her work draws on her working-class diasporic roots to interrogate class, race and gender in contemporary life in the UK..

Sabba Khan’s debut graphic novel The Roles We Play won the Jhalak prize and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year in 2021. The medium of comics and sequential art form a central praxis to her approach, at once accessible and immediate, they are a way to examine and make sense of complex and entangled systems and structures, for both the private and the public. As such, Sabba’s work takes you on a journey, one of critical reflection, curious questioning, and ultimately deeper understanding.

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.