| Biographical Notes
Baha Boukhari, Palestine
Baha Boukhari works in Ramallah for the Palestinian daily, Al-Ayyam. He is said to have close ties to the Palestinian Authority. Known for their moderation, Boukhari’s images are generally warmly received by the Israeli public. The subject matter of his cartoons most often involves that of the Israeli occupying forces in Palestine. Some of his most incisive work published last November focused on the building of the separation wall between the Palestinians and Israelis.
Boukhari began his career as a cartoonist in 1964 at the Al-Rai Alaam newspaper, and continued to work for the Al-Anba and Al-Quds before starting at Al-Ayyam in 1999.
Boukhari is a member of a number of associations including the General University of Palestinian Writers & Journalists, Federation of Arab Journalists, General Union of Palestinian Artists, Arab Cartoonists Association, and Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate.
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Cintia Bolio, Mexico
Cintia Bolio lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. A self-taught artist who started publishing cartoons in 1996, Bolio is a self-proclaimed feminist and left-wing political cartoonist, inspired by “the worst that society has to offer.” Her work often targets the political elite, injustice, and equality.
Born in 1969, Bolio has participated in several exhibitions, and is currently participating in the European-American exhibition "...de ellas ” in Spain and in the “Las mujeres creadoras y el arte de la caricatura” an international exhibition in Colombia featuring work by female cartoonists.
Her work has appeared in newspapers such as La Jornada, Milenio Diario, Milenio Diario de Monterrey and Uno Mas Uno Magazines. Magazines include El Chamuco, Conozca Más, Milenio Semanal, Expansión, and Vértigo.
www.powerofculture.nl/uk/specials/cartoons/mexico01.html
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Jeff Danziger, United States
An independent cartoonist for nearly 25 years, New Yorker Jeff Danziger’s work has appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the world from the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to the Toronto Globe, Mail, LeMonde, and the China Daily. His work has also appeared in magazines ranging from Newsweek and Forbes to The New Yorker and the Texas Observer.
A Vietnam War veteran, Danziger started his career at a local Vermont newspaper in 1971 earning a dollar per cartoon. He currently draws from six to ten cartoons a week on a wide variety of topical, and often controversial subjects, most frequently focused on election fraud, political figures or international affairs. In 2006 he received the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning and in 1993 was awarded the Overseas Press Award.
www.danzigercartoons.com
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Liza Donnelly, United States
Photo Credit: Cynthia Delconte
Liza Donnelly is a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Her cartoons have appeared regularly in the magazine since 1982, at which time she was the youngest and one of only three women cartoonists at the magazine.
The topics of her cartoons are subject to a broad examination of life, from the most banal aspects of relationships and office politics to child-rearing and city-life neurosis. Her work has appeared in many other national publications, including the New York Times, The Nation, Audubon, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, National Lampoon, American Photographer, Scholastic News, and Cobblestone. Donnelly conceived of and edited three collections of cartoons for Ballantine Books called Mothers and Daughters, Fathers and Sons and Husbands and Wives (the last two in partnership with her husband cartoonist Michael Maslin). She has illustrated numerous adult books and has written and illustrated a children’s series of seven dinosaur books for Scholastic, Inc., which together sold over two million copies. Donnelly also wrote Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, a book about the history of the women cartoonists of The New Yorker. She is currently writing and illustrating two new children’s books, The Rainbow and There’s A Hippo in My Backyard.
Donnelly has been a member of the Authors Guild since 1984, and was a founding member of the Cartoonists Association. She lives in New York with her husband and their two daughters.
www.lizadonnelly.com
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Carsten Graabæk, Denmark
Danish cartoonist Carsten Graabæk lives and works in Copenhagen. He is best known for his comic strip Statsministeren (The Prime Minister) that he created in 1982. The strip, which satirizes the ineptitudes of leaders of modern European democracies, has been syndicated internationally ever since. In 1984, Graabæk created the Kenny & Sue color comic strip about a mother and child relationship. Two years prior, Graabæk sent a comic strip named Aftenlandet (The Occident) to a press agency in Copenhagen, where his talent was immediately recognized.
In 1990, Denmark’s former prime minister Poul Schlüter presented Graabæk with the Danish comic award, Ping.
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Moustafa Hussein, Egypt
Moustafa Hussein has worked nearly 30 years for the Cairo daily, Al-Akhbar. Well-respected by the public, Hussein maintains a fairly close relationship with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. His political connections however do not keep him from maintaining a critical opinion of the Egyptian government.
Hussein is the director of the Press Cartoonists Association in Cairo.
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Hassan Karimzadeh, Iran
Hassan Karimzadeh has been a graphic designer, political cartoonist, and art director for journals and newspapers for more than ten years. Born in Tehran in 1973, he was imprisoned in the 1990s for a cartoon which featured a soccer player resembling the late Ayatollah Khomeini. He received a 10-year conviction, but with the assistance from Reporters Without Borders and many individual international cartoonists Hassan was released after one year in 1994.
Often distinctively free of captions, his work has appeared inmany graphic and cartoon exhibitions around the world. He published and illustrated the book Human Rights in 2004. He graduated from the Plastic Arts School & University of Art in Tehran. He is a member of Iranian Graphic Designers Society and the Association of Iranian Journalists.
www.irancartoon.com/Karimzadeh/index.htm
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Michel Kichka, Israel
A native Belgian and the son of Holocaust survivors, Michel Kichka moved to Israel in 1974 and has since been a freelance illustrator of editorial and political cartoons, comic strips, children’s books, and advertising. Political in nature, Kichka’s work focuses primarily on current events surrounding the Middle East.
Kichka currently serves as a senior lecturer of illustration and comic art at the Bezalel Academy’s Visual Communications Department in Jerusalem. Kichka has also worked for Israel’s Channel Two television network. In November 2005, he organized a meeting of international illustrators at the Mishkenot ShaananimCultural Center in Jerusalem. He frequently takes part in the exhibitions organized in conjunction with the meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, New York, and Aman, Jordan.
Kichka has staged solo exhibitions in Israel and overseas and participated in numerous group exhibitions and cartoon festivals all over the world.
www.israelcentersf.org/culture/profiles/michelkichka.shtml
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Mike Luckovich, United States
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich is the most nationally reprinted cartoonist in the United States. An editorial cartoonist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 1989, in 2006 he became the first cartoonist to receive two of the most prestigious awards in the same year: the Reuben, the National Cartoonist Society’s top award for cartoonist of the year, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Published this year with an introduction by former President Jimmy Carter, Luckovich’s book, Four More Years!, features a compilation of cartoons and memoirs that in addition to the current President Bush, “cast a wicked net over Bill Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Robertson, the Catholic church, and even the Boy Scouts.”
Born in Seattle, Luckovich graduated from the University of Washington in 1982, sold life insurance door-to-door for two years, and got his first editorial cartoonist job in South Carolina with the Greenville News in 1984. He left Greenville nine months later for a job with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, then joined the Journal-Constitution in 1989. Luckovich was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
Syndicated in over 150 newspapers, Luckovich’s work appears regularly in Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
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Ranan Lurie, United States
The most widely-syndicated political cartoonist in the world, according to the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records, Ranan Lurie has created more than 11,000 political cartoons, published ten cartoon books and one novel. Nominated in 2002 by the Republic of Cyprus for the Nobel Peace Prize, Lurie’s work has appeared in publications such as Life, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time Int., U.S. News & World Report, Die Welt, The London Times, The Asahi Shimbun, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung of Switzerland and the Foreign Affairs Magazine, where he now serves as the publication’s regular political cartoonist. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the editor-in-chief of cartoonnewsmagazine.com.
Before relocating to the United States as a cartoonist for Life in 1968, Lurie, who was born in Egypt, served as staff political cartoonist for Israel’s largest paper, Yedioth Aharonoth for nearly 10 years. Publishing his first cartoon book at the age of 20, he was named two years later the editor-in-chief of an Israeli news magazine. He has received 22 national and international awards, had 17 exhibitions, sculpted 28 statues, painted more than 2,000 oil/acrylic paintings, and has written nearly 3,200 articles. Lurie has taught at the University of Hawaii and lectured on current affairs at a number of universities and colleges.
In addition to interviewing over 72 world leaders, Lurie has done caricatures of presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, secretaries of state William Rogers and Henry Kissinger of the United States. In 1995, the United Nations Society of Artists and Writers designated the annual International Award for Political Cartooning to be named after Lurie.
Lurie lives and works in New York with his wife and four children.
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Gado, Kenya
Godfrey Mwampembwa “Gado” is a freelance cartoonist living in Nairobi, Kenya. The most syndicated editorial cartoonist in East and Central Africa, Gado’s work explores a wide range of topics from terrorism and deforestation to HIV/AIDS and corruption.
A regular contributor to the Daily Nation (Kenya), New African (U.K.), Courier International (France), Business Day (South Africa) and Sunday Tribune (South Africa), his work has also been published in Le Monde, Washington Times, Des Standard, and Japan Times. Born in 1969 in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, Gado joined the Ardhi Institute to study architecture in 1991, but left one year later to become the editorial cartoonist and illustrator of Nation Media Group, the largest media house in East and Central Africa. Before joining Nation, Gado freelanced with the Tanzanian publications Daily News, Business Times, and The Express. Gado has also published two books: Abunuwasi, a short story comic book and Democrazy! a collection of his editorial cartoons.
During his time at Fabrica, a communication research center in Treviso, Italy, Gado created an animated video on racism and in 2000 joined the Vancouver Film School in Canada, where he studied classical animation and filmmaking. In 1996 he was honored by the International Olympic Media Award in Print Media and in 1999 was named Kenya Cartoonist of the Year. A painter in oil and watercolors, his work has been exhibited in Tanzania, Kenya, France, Norway, Finland, and Italy.
Gado is a member of Kenya Union of Journalists, the Association of East African Cartoonists, Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate, and a Board Member of Cartoonist Rights Network.
www.gadonet.com
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Plantu, France
Plantu is a French editorial cartoonist whose work is best known for its frequent appearance in Le Monde.
In 1971, he quit medical school in order to study drawing at the Ecole de Saint-Luc in Bruxelles, popularized by Hergé. A year later, Le Monde published his first drawing dealing with the Vietnam War. This marked the beginning of his career at Le Monde, where his editorial cartoons have graced the front page since 1985, in an effort to “acknowledge the French tradition of political cartoons.”
In 1991, during an exhibition in Tunis, Plantu met the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who drew the Star of David on the Israeli flag for one of Plantu’s drawings. The illustration won an award called “Prix du document” at the Festival du scoop in Angers, France. A year later, Arafat and Shimon Pérès autographed one of Plantu’s drafts before they decided to ratify the Oslo Accords.
In 1998, the French postal service distributed a 3 franc stamp designed by Plantu, to raise money for the international humanitarian organization, Médecins Sans Frontières. That same year, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNESCO published several dozen brochures illustrated by Plantu.
Born in Paris in 1951, His drawings have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Georgian, as well as many other languages.
www.plantu.net
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Ann Telnaes, United States
Ann Telnaes is a freelance cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Le Monde, Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, Austin American-Statesman, and other highly-regarded newspapers.
In 2001 Telnaes became the second woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning and in 1997 she received the National Headliner Award for Editorial Cartoons.
Before beginning her career as an editorial cartoonist, Telnaes worked at Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Imagineering. She has been an animator and layout designer for various animation studios in London, Los Angeles, Taiwan, and New York.
Born in in Stockholm in 1960, Telnaes became a U.S. citizen at the age of thirteen. She is a board member of the Cartoonists Rights Network and the National Cartoonists Society Foundation. She is a past vice president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and a member of the American Newswomen’s Club.
Telnaes lives and works in Washington D.C.
www.anntelnaes.com
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Norio Yamanoi, Japan
Chairman of the Japanese branch of the Federation of Cartoonist Association (FECO), Norio Yamanoi lives in Aomori, 700k north of Tokyo.
His Japanese name, Norio, translates as “Educated Hero” in Chinese, although the cartoonist uses the pronounciation and pen name NO-RIO in his cartoons. He discovered that with this pronounciation, his name also means “I don’t laugh” in Spanish.
In 1991 he won the Bunshun Manga Sho, the most prestigious cartoon award in Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1947, he left Japan in 1977 for Paris, where he made movies including one for UNESCO’s Arm Reduction Campaign. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Davos conference, hosted by an international coalition of NGOs which runs parallel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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