Ali Fitzgerald loves hammocks, fizzy drinks and nineties comfort television. With words and images, she likes crafting sordid underworlds with queer, folk-horror leanings, and satirical twists.
Here are a handful of interviews if you'd like to read more about her:
As a multi-modal artist, she sorted her work bio into a few categories below.
Writing with images, AKA comics:
Ali Fitzgerald's acclaimed first graphic nonfiction book, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe was published in late 2018 with Fantagraphics and won the Independent Publisher’s award for best graphic book (2019).
She also writes and draws regularly for magazines and newspapers. Her popular comic "Hungover Bear and Friends" was published by McSweeney's and she contributed comics to the Book Section of The New York Times. She regularly writes and draws for The New Yorker, including the ongoing series “America!”
Other comics//drawings have appeared in Art das Kunst Magazin, New York Magazine: the Cut, The Guardian, the Huffington Post, Art21, Vox.com, Modern Painters, Gastronomica, Berlin Quarterly, and Bitch Magazine.
More recently, she published an eight-page comic in the 2023 Christmas Issue of The New Yorker about the secret comic career of Patricia Highsmith. In 2025, she will publish Squeak, Chatter, Bark, an all-ages eco-mystery, with Fantagraphics
Writing without images:
Ali was a European correspondent and art critic for Art21 from 2010 to 2016, where she started the column Queer Berlin in 2013. She has also written for Daily Serving, ...might be good, Pastelegram, New York Arts Magazine, Granta and The New Yorker.
Exhibitions, etc:
Ali's artwork has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe as well as mentioned in The Economist, Bookriot, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Artlies, Varoom Magazine, The Guardian, Art in America, Afar Magazine, the Tagesspiegel, Dadada Magazine and Tip Magazin.
In lieu of a c.v., here are a few of the galleries and museums where Ali's work has been exhibited:
Haus am Lützowplatz, SP2 Gallery, Austin Museum of Art, Davidson College, Deutsche Bank Kunstalle, the University of Mississippi, 56 Henry, Center for Book Arts, Museum of the Comic Strip (Angoulême), Beit Beirut Museum, L'Oiseau Presente.
Collaborations with Museums and Curators:
Ali Fitzgerald often works with museums and urban spaces on comic and mural projects.
In 2018, she created a series of Magritte-inspired drawings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to coincide with their exhibition of his works.
In late 2021/2022, she was commissioned by curators Ruth Ur and Julia Kaschlinski to create a series of murals in the Berlin subway station, Humboldthain (here's a snippet of the press it received in German). Later that year, she collaborated with Ur again on a graphic novella showing the life of Rosi Posner in Kiel in the early nineteen-thirties.
For the Museum of Modern Art, in 2022, she wrote and drew a comic about the life of visual designer Susan Kare. This comic, titled "Iconic," was nominated for the Studio Cartoonist Award and later reprinted in the Hong Kong magazine, BranD.
Lectures and Workshops:
In the Summer of 2015 she began a weekly comic workshop with asylum-seekers which was supported by Comic Invasion and Amnesty International. The comic workshops and the drawings created were featured in Bento.de, the Taggespiegel and Amnesty International Magazine.
In the fall of 2018, her book tour for Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe included talks at the Skowhegan art space in New York, Quincy’s in Chicago, Politics and Prose in Washington D.C. and the Portland Book Festival.
She has given a variety of lectures and workshops in other contexts: a keynote lecture titled "Visual Storytelling as a Tool to Affect Social Change" at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco (2016), a comics lecture and workshop at the National Library in Germany (2016), and visual storytelling workshops at the University of Bath and Shakespeare and Company in Paris (2018).
Between 2019 and 2023, she gave artist talks and comic workshops at Davidson College, the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, Grafill in Norway, the University of Mississippi, the University of Nebraska, DePaul University, Syracuse University, the Paris Institute of Art, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others.
Since 2020, she has taught regular comic workshops in conjunction with the Berlin Drawing Room.
Awards and Residencies:
Ali Fitzgerald was awarded fellowships for a number of residencies, starting with Skowhegan Art in 2004. In 2017 she was awarded the Cornish Fellowship with the Center for Cartoon Studies, and in early 2018 she was awarded the Georgia Fee Fellowship in Paris through Artslant.
In the fall of 2020 she was a resident of the prestigious Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France.
Fitzgerald's work has received critical acclaim. Her graphic nonfiction book, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe (Fantagraphics, 2018) was named one of the best comics of 2018 by New York Magazine and won the Independent Publisher’s award for best graphic book of 2019. In 2023, she was nominated for the Cartoonist Studio Prize for her comic for the Museum of Modern Art.