The Graphic Medicine International Collective is committed to the hard work of thoughtful growth, ensuring sustainability over time, and careful articulation of our mission, vision, and values as a metric against which we will measure all of our actions moving forward.
The mission of GMIC is to guide and support the use of comics in health.
We strive to be the leading organization for the use of comics in health. We aspire to be sustainable, to cultivate collaboration and belonging, and to have a positive impact within the graphic medicine community and beyond.
We value kindness, compassion, and inclusivity. We welcome curiosity, creativity, and ingenuity. We foster community, connection, and collaboration. We commit to transparency, honesty, and accountability to ourselves and to our community.
Contact GMIC
You can get in touch with the GMIC board chairs using our contact form.
Learn more about our website team here.
Our History
Of the term “Graphic Medicine”
Inspired by Brian Fies’s graphic memoir Mom’s Cancer, Ian Williams coined the term ‘graphic medicine’ in 2007 for the name of a website, www.graphicmedicine.org. He intended this site to catalog comics that included as their subject issues of physical and mental health, illness, disability, and caregiving. The term took on a more formal definition in the Graphic Medicine Manifesto (Penn State Press, 2014) to mean, “the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.” Ian also began to use the term as a way to denote the role that comics can play in healthcare. Over time, the term ‘graphic medicine’ has been adopted as an accepted term for this area of study and practice. Ian writes on the graphic medicine website,
“My use of the word ‘medicine’ was not meant to connote the foregrounding of doctors over other healthcare professionals or over patients or comics artists, but rather the suggestion that use of comics might have some sort of therapeutic potential – ‘medicine’ as in the bottled panacea rather than the profession… I wanted to keep the definition purposefully broad, as, to my thinking, the discipline could include graphic memoirs of illness, educational comics for both students and patients, academic papers and books, gag strips about healthcare, graphic reportage and therapeutic workshops involving comic making, as well as many other practices and source material, both fictional and non-fictional.”
Of the community that has formed at this intersection:
After setting up graphicmedicine.org in 2007, Ian was contacted by Michael Green. Dr. Green had been using comics as a teaching tool with medical students and was thrilled to discover Ian’s site. Along with his colleague Kimberly Meyers in the Humanities Department at Penn State College of Medicine, he published an article in the British Medical Journal which introduced graphic medicine to a larger audience. After some email communication, they reached out to a professor in the English department at Penn State, Susan Squier, who had been teaching and publishing about the value of comics in health care.
In 2010, the first graphic medicine conference was convened in London, England. The intention was to examine the viability of graphic medicine as a serious topic in health, and to perhaps learn from practitioners in various arenas how they were using comics in health and medicine. An account of that first gathering can be read on the graphic medicine website.
In light of the success of the first conference, the following year, a second graphic medicine conference (at that time called Comics & Medicine) was organized in Chicago. Since then, an annual conference has been a hallmark of this field. Practitioners of graphic medicine have gathered from many places and positionings to teach and learn about this rich area of creative work and study. A full listing of all conferences, locations, themes, reports, and associated projects can be found on the graphic medicine website under the “Conferences” tab.
Of the Graphic Medicine International Collective
The annual graphic medicine conferences continued informally for several years, with former and future hosts of conferences being offered a position on the ongoing conference organizing committee. In 2017, after eight successful conferences, serious conversation began taking place about formalizing the group to allow for increased ongoing programming beyond the conferences, to help fund, support, and grow the website, as well as to provide a more stable foundation for the future of the community. After much deliberation, debate, and research, in the fall of 2019, an organizing committee gathered in Harrisburg, PA to develop a strategic plan and formally incorporate the group into a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization in the United States.
Current Board Members
Ian Williams
Dr Ian Williams is a comics artist, writer and doctor who lives in Brighton. His graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, was published in 2014 and followed up in 2019 by The Lady Doctor. Both were critically acclaimed and he is working on his third, for the same publishers, provisionally entitled The Sick Doctor, which will be published in 2022. He studied Fine Art after medical school and then became involved in the Medical Humanities movement. He named the area of study called Graphic Medicine, building this website in 2007, which he currently co-edits. He is Founder of the not-for-profit Graphic Medicine International Collective and co-author of the Eisner-nominated Graphic Medicine Manifesto. He has been the recipient of several grants has contributed to numerous medical, humanities, and comics publications, and has sat on the board of a number of arts and humanities organisations. Between May 2015 and January 2017 he drew a weekly comic strip, Sick Notes, for The Guardian. He recently made an animation with Matilda Tristram for The Care Under Pressure project from Exeter University. He has spoken at numerous medical humanities, comic art and literary events. Ian is represented by Kirsty McLachlan of Morgan Green Creatives. He tweets and is on instagram as @thebaddr
Michael Green
Michael is a physician and bioethicist, and a professor in the Departments of Humanities and Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine. He has been interested in comics (and all forms of visual arts) since childhood, and created a first-of-its-kind course on Comics and Medicine for medical students (students’ comics can be viewed here). As a physician, he cares for patients, teaches medical students, and is an NIH-funded researcher in the area of end-of-life decision-making and advance care planning. He is co-author of the Graphic Medicine Manifestoand published several landmark articles on Graphic Medicine including “Missed It,” the first comic to be featured in a mainstream medical journal. These days, he is the standing guest editor of the Graphic Medicine section of the Annals of Internal Medicine, and has authored several of his own comics. His professional profile can be viewed here and he can be found on Instagram @mjg15.
Alex Thomas
Alex Thomas is a pediatric allergist/immunologist and a cartoonist and illustrator with more than 20 years experience. He is the creator of Iggy and the Inhalers, an award-winning comic-based educational program that teaches kids about asthma. It has been translated into 3 languages and has been used by hundreds of clinics and hospitals around the world. Alex is co-founder of Booster Shot Media, a company that educates people of all ages about complex health topics using the power of comics. He has presented on the use of comics in health education extensively over the years, including San Diego Comic-Con International. He has a faculty appointment in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine where he teaches clinical applications of graphic medicine to medical students. When not graphic medicining, he continues to see patients in his allergy practice in Chicago. www.boostershotmedia.com Twitter: @BoosterShotCmx Instagram: @boostershot
Benjamin Schwartz, board co-chair
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.
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.
Rocío Pichon-Rivière, board secretary
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.
A. David Lewis, board treasurer
A. David Lewis, PhD is an Eisner Award nominee (2015) and judge (2023), as well as co-editor of both Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. Dr. Lewis is an Associate Professor of English and Health Humanities at MCPHS University in Boston, MA as well as a member of its Center for Health Humanities. His teaching and research there focus on both the depiction of cancer in comic books and graphic novels as well as the health impacts of loneliness. In addition to being the writer for such comics as The Lone and Level Sands and Kismet, Man of Fate, he currently serves as the inaugural co-editor of the Graphic Medicine Review journal, and his new book, Body, Soul, and Comics: Graphic Religion and Graphic Medicine, will be released by University Press of Mississippi in May 2026.
Soha Bayoumi
Soha Bayoumi, PhD, is a political theorist and historian whose work examines the intersection of health and social justice and the medicine-politics nexus, with a regional focus on the Middle East and a particular interest in postcolonial and gender studies. Her research and teaching focus on medicine and authoritarianism; gendered aspects of healthcare; and the visual cultures of medicine, science, and technology (especially in comics and cinema). She is a Teaching Professor in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program at the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and associate editor of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS).
Jen Leach
Jen Leach (a.k.a furtivedoodles) is a New York–based artist and writer working at the intersection of healthcare, narrative, and design. By day, she drives student wellbeing communications and initiatives at New York University, where she promotes health literacy and population health. Early in her career, she hid her (bipolar) diagnosis and her creative aspirations, doodling “furtively” in protest. While earning her MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia, she discovered Graphic Medicine, and presenting at the Brighton conference marked her “coming out” as an artist and mental health advocate. Jen calls the healing power of making things—like plush pills—“crafty medicine,” and her projects include Side Defects, No Agony for Da-Feet, Boobless, and Placebo Plushies.
Esther Saltzman
Esther Saltzman, PhD, is the Nursing Liaison for GMIC. Through graphic medicine, she has been able to combine her background in nursing with her teaching of literature. She has taught graphic medicine classes through the English Departments at the Memphis College of Art and at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the co-editor of Drawn from the Classics, Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works, and has written on comics and nursing in the Journal of Radiology Nursing. While at the Memphis College of Art, she collaborated with comics and illustration professors to have students produce patient education materials for the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital diabetes and asthma clinics. Currently, she is in collaborative talks to facilitate conversations among various nursing professionals and educators. Having found a home in the graphic medicine community, Esther is also interested in facilitating various collaborations and partnerships among graphic medicine health professionals, artists, educators, and enthusiasts.
Gianna Paniagua
Gianna Paniagua is a two-time heart transplant recipient of 33 years, papercutting sculptor, and graphic medicine artist who is from and based in NYC. She utilizes her lifetime of experiences in medicine to create artwork about the dualities of the human body, as well as comics that propose questions about the chronic illness patient experience. In 2014 she received the Grand Prize for the Emerging Young Artist award from The Kennedy Center, and has collaborated with The Smithsonian, Genentech, and SFMOMA to exhibit her handcut paper sculptures. She earned her MFA in visual art from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2018. In 2019 she came back to her hometown to attend Columbia University’s Postbaccalaureate Premed Program with the intention of applying to medical school, and earned her Master’s in Narrative Medicine from Columbia in 2024. Her lifelong goal is to find creative solutions to problems that exist in the field of transplantation for young adult patients. Her comic “Are We Ever Really Recovered?” was published in the Johns Hopkins medical journal, Literature and Medicine, and she regularly collaborates with the Columbia Surgery social media account for comics meant for an audience of medical professionals. Gianna publishes the Comics Corner column in Bonus Days Magazine, which depicts stories around organ transplantation and the importance of community. Based on what she was lacking in her youth, Gianna founded a peer-led young adult support group for solid organ transplant recipients around the world ages 18-47 that allows members to chat 24/7. In her free time, you can find her somewhere in the city on a bus sketching while on her way to buy more fountain pen ink.
Emeritus Board Members
Susan Squier
Susan is Brill Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. From 2016-2021, she served as Einstein Visiting Fellow, Freie Universität, Berlin, and was part of the PathoGraphics Project, examining the relationship between illness narratives and works of graphic medicine. Squier’s many books include PathoGraphics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community (2020), Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor (2017), Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004), Babies in Bottles: Twentieth- Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011). She has been scholar in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; the Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung, Berlin; The Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy; Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia; and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia. She serves on the editorial boards of Configurations, Literature and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Reproductive Biomedicine Online. Her co-edited special issue of Configurations, “Graphic Medicine,” was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014. She is a founding member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective and she co-edits the Graphic Medicine book series at Penn State University Press. http://susanmerrillsquier.com, @susansquier
Dana Walrath
Dana Walrath, a writer, artist, and medical anthropologist, likes to cross borders and disciplines with her work. After years of using stories and art to teach medical students at University of Vermont’s College of Medicine, she spent 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar in Armenia completing Like Water on Stone (2014), her award-winning verse novel about the Armenian genocide. Her graphic memoir, Aliceheimer’s (2016) about life with her mother, Alice,and dementia, was featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on National Public Radio. Passionate about the power of comics and art for social change, her interactive installation, “The Book of Genocides” uses artists books drawn into and redacted from the surface of a mid-twentieth century zoology text to unite all genocides across space and time, to show its ongoing presence, to heal from it, and to end it. Her illustrated essays, comics, and commentary have appeared in The Lancet, Irish Times, Slate, Somatosphere, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio. She has shown her artwork and spoken extensively about the healing power of stories throughout North America and Eurasia including two TEDx talks. A Senior Atlantic Fellow for Brain Health Equity, at the Global Brain Health Institute of Trinity College Dublin | University of California San Francisco, she is currently composing a second Aliceheimer’s book titled, Between Alice and the Eagle, that blends memoir with anthropological discourse on the end of life, stigma, gender, labor flows, and dementia across the globe. She has just completed the libretto for the opera version of Aliceheimer’s with support from the Vermont Arts Council and National Endowment of the Arts. With work spanning the entire life cycle, other recent projects include the picture book I Am a Bird (2018) and a contribution to Menopause: A Comic Treatment (2020) a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2020. You can visit her at www.danawalrath.com
Juliet McMullin
Juliet McMullin, PhD is a Professor of Family Medicine and the Endowed Chair and Director for Medical Humanities and Arts in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests that engage issues in health humanities with a particular focus on health equity and relational practices of being well, explorations of intersectional approaches in medicine, and creative reimagining for care such as community engaged research and abolition medicine. Her comics work ranges from, the role of comics making on medical student professional development, to the role of comics making for people living with cancer on symptom management and how comics narratives engage discourses of health equity through diverse lived experiences. She previously hosted the 6th Annual Comics and Medicine Conference at Riverside, edited the Image + Text series for Somatosphere, and collaboratively developed and hosts the Historical Wisdom podcast. Juliet is currently on the editorial board for Literature & Medicine, and a co-editor for Graphic Medicine Series at Penn State Press.
MK Czerwiec
MK Czerwiec is a nurse, cartoonist, and educator. She is the creator of Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 (Penn State University Press, 2017), a co-author of Graphic Medicine Manifesto (PSU Press, 2014), editor of Menopause: A Comic Treatment (Penn State University Press, 2020) and creator of LB&Me: A Tribute, Memoir, and an Invitation (2025). MK was also the founding comics editor for the journal Literature & Medicine. She co-moderates the website and online community of GraphicMedicine.org. MK regularly teaches graphic medicine at Northwestern Medical School, the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago (Biomedical Visualization program) and guest lectures internationally. She has served as an Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern’s Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, a Senior Fellow of the George Washington School of Nursing Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement, and a Will Eisner Fellow in Applied Cartooning at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. www.comicnurse.com.
Shelley Wall
Shelley is a medical artist and an assistant professor in the Biomedical Communications graduate program at the University of Toronto, where students are trained in medical and scientific illustration and animation for a wide variety of audiences. Shelley also conducts and supervises research into the design, creation, and evaluation of visual media in medical and scientific contexts. Her interest in graphic medicine arises from two sources, which quickly merge into a single stream. The first is professional: medical illustration is a form of visual storytelling; it combines image & text, research & experience, time & space, language & line (and, and, and…) to convey complex messages, and so the affinity with comics seemed obvious, but not simple. The second is personal, and arose when it seemed that the only medium flexible enough to convey my individual experience with illness, caregiving, and the healthcare system was the graphic novel. In the same way that comics bring together image and text, drama and reflection, and humour and pathos, the study of comics seems to permit the symbiosis of academic and personal, of theory and raw experience, in a way that many other disciplines do not. Shelley had the privilege of co-organizing the third annual Comics & Medicine conference at the University of Toronto in July 2012. She teaches a graduate elective course in Comics & Medicine, and, as illustrator-in-residence in the Health, Arts, and Humanities Program in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, she is developing a curricular component on comics and medicine for the Faculty’s undergraduate medical training.
Ebru Ustundag
Ebru Ustundag is a critical feminist geographer interested in intersections of health/care and social justice. She is a Professor of Geography at Brock University and a graduate faculty member in the interdisciplinary Social Justice and Equity Studies MA program. She is also the co-editor of the journal, ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies. Ebru has been have been an active member of the Canadian Association of Health Humanities Advisory Committee for the past 3 years.
Matthew Noe
Matthew Noe (he/his) is Lead Collection & Knowledge Management Librarian at Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, and a part-time instructor at the University of Kentucky in the School of Information Science. Matthew came to graphic medicine during grad school and has never looked back, building multiple library collections, developing book club programs, and developing countless opportunities for professional development. He led and coauthored a scoping review on comics in health education and codeveloped the Essential Graphic Medicine annotated bibliography. Matthew reviews and writes lesson plans for comics at Diamond Bookshelf under the column Noe’s Comics Nook and provides reviews for nonfiction comics with Booklist. He is currently President of ALA GNCRT, a 2020 ALA Emerging Leader, and has too many other professional roles to list them all here. He also serves as Treasurer on the Worcester Public Library’s Board of Directors. You can often find him overcaffeinated, screaming about all manner of things on Twitter, or curled up with two dogs, a book, and not enough hands. Find Matthew on BlueSky @NoetheMatt.
Related International Partners
While GMIC aims to live up to our name and serve an international audience, we want to acknowledge similar groups across the globe doing similar work in the Graphic Medicine space: