The Graphic Medicine International Collective is proud to announce and welcome our four new board members!
Barbra Dillon
Barbra Dillon is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Fanbase Press, an Eisner, Harvey, and GLAAD Media Awards-nominated publishing company and geek media outlet that seeks to produce new and distinctive works that give voice to the themes, ideals, and people that make “geekdom” so exceptional. She also serves as an Advisory Board member and Co-Coordinator of Programming and Marketing for The Latinx Comic Arts Festival. Outside of her work in the comics community, Barbra is the Senior Director of Operations for Gemelli Biotech.
Rae Lanzerotti
Rae Lanzerotti (they/she) utilizes disability access tools in memoir comics and zines, multimodal art books, and assemblages that stretch comics from visual media into tactual, audible, and other dimensions. When sudden vision loss changed how they read, Rae found comics and started making their own graphic medicine on topics like seeing double, aging, queerness, and neighborhood life. They won awards for innovative projects in the Accessible Comics Design Competition (2022) and presented on accessible comics design at the Graphic Medicine Conference (2023). Now they make haptic artworks, which could be described as oversized, abstract zines, for local community education projects, museums, and exhibitions. Rae is a longtime teacher of somatic and contemplative practices with elders in integrative health settings and community organizations. Go to IG: @RaeRotti and RLanzerotti.com to read their freely offered comics.
Rocío Pichon-Rivière 
Rocío Pichon-Rivière (she/ella) is a scholar, artist, and educator. She is an assistant professor of Latin American literature at UC Irvine and founding co-director of the Graphic Narratives Research Cluster at UCI School of Humanities. Prior, she has also taught at NYU, Pratt Institute, and UC Riverside, and was the director of the Medical and Health Humanities designated emphasis at UCR School of Medicine. She writes about trans* and queer theory, decolonial feminism, comics, vernacular phenomenology, health humanities, and transformative justice. Her scholarship proposes an archive and intellectual history of marginalized Latin American thinkers and pays attention to the role of alternative media in the dissemination of transformative ideas. Her first comic, “The Neurobiology of Protest,” appeared in Literature & Medicine.
Benjamin Schwartz
A professional cartoonist with a medical degree, Benjamin Schwartz uses visual storytelling techniques to teach medical students the art of communication and empathy as part of the Narrative Medicine program within Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he serves as an Assistant Professor of Medicine (in Surgery). He is a staff cartoonist for the New Yorker, where he has written and drawn cartoons since 2011, and his work has also appeared in Esquire, Airmail, and Wired among others. In his administrative role as Chief Creative Officer for the Department of Surgery, he oversees the Strategic Communications team in its work to promote health literacy among the general public, increase access to specialized medical care for prospective patients, and develop continuing education events for healthcare professionals.
Very exciting to read the profiles of the new board members and I look forward to connecting and communicating with each one of you in more depth in the near future! MazeL Tov!!