bio
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: Flying Couch, a NYT’s Editor’s Choice and Kirkus “Best Memoir” of 2016, and Artificial: A Love Story, forthcoming October 2023. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and she’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” a four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIRED and many other places. She’s taught writing and comics at Parsons The New School for Design, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Center for Talented Youth, Interlochen Center for the Arts, in New York City Public Schools, and in many other venues, and she currently teaches a monthly cartooning class to a growing community of virtual students all over the world via her Patreon.
Website: amykurzweil.com
Contact: amykurz@gmail.com
Workshop Topics
Subject
Making Comics Workshop
In this hands on workshop, we learn about the simple building blocks of comics as a way to tell our own stories. Thinking of drawing as a language, we learn about and practice simple mark making to communicate emotion and expression.
Audience
All ages. No drawing skills necessary.
Subject
New Yorker Cartoon Workshop
In this hands on workshop, we look at, appreciate, and learn about New Yorker style single panel cartoons and then make our own with guided prompts.
Audience
Middle school and up
Subject
The Art of Graphic Resurrection
In this lecture, I speak about the process of writing and drawing both my graphic memoirs: Flying Couch (a graphic memoir about three generations of women in my family that tells the story of my maternal grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw Ghetto) and Artificial: A Love Story (a graphic memoir about my father’s quest to reanimate the identity of his late father, an escapee from Vienna, though AI and salvaged documents). I can focus the talk more on one book or the other or equally on both.
Audience
High school and up