Speakers

Paul Gravett
Co-founder of Escape magazine and Comica Festival, Paul Gravett is a London-based writer, curator, critic, and lecturer specializing in international comics. His books include Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (2004), Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life (2005), Great British Comics (2006), Incredibly Strange Comics (2008), Comics Art (2013), Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (2017) and Posy Simmonds (2019). He also edited 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (2011). He curated God Save The Comics! (1990), the largest exhibition of original art from British comics for the Angoulême International Comics Festival, France, and co-curated Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK (2014) for The British Library, co-writing the accompanying book. In 2017, he curated Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, which The Barbican Centre is touring worldwide. In 2021 he co-curated the most comprehensive retrospective ever of Posy Simmonds’ work for The Cartoon Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which continues at the Maison de la B.D. in Blois, France till March 2022. His next book is on Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.
​
Find more at www.paulgravett.com
​

Pramod K Nayar is a Professor at the Department of English, the University of Hyderabad, India. His recent books include The Human Rights Graphic Novel (Routledge 2021), Essays in Celebrity Culture (Anthem 2021), Ecoprecarity (Routledge 2019), Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury 2020), Human Rights and Literature (Palgrave 2016), The Indian Graphic Novel (Routledge 2016).
​
Find more at https://sites.google.com/site/pramodknayar/
https://soh.uohyd.ac.in/english/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2021/06/PKN-Webpage.pdf
Pramod K Nayar

Suraya Md Nasir (Malaysia, 1986) received her Ph.D. in the Manga and Anime Department of Kyoto Seika University in 2019, with a focus on manga theory. She is currently teaching in the animation department, Faculty of Arts, Computing, and Creative Industries, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Ismail (UPSI) where she teaches character design, script, and storyboard classes. She is interested in cultural studies, more specifically; her work examines the influence of manga on the establishment of new identities in Malaysian young artists and their comics. She is also interested in how identity is presented in other media; and how Japanese animation is consumed and negotiated in the Malaysian market and media system. Known by her pseudonym Jonsuraya, she is a comic artist with a twelve-year experience where she published titles such as Jejon Di Jepun series (2015-ongoing). She is also involved in the pre-production stages of animation-making where she debuted her first 2D animation title as a creator and creative director in 2015 titled Misi Ady.
​
Suraya Md Nasir
Kushagra Kushwaha is an Animator and Concept artist working with several anime studios such as David Productions, JC Staff, Seven. He was born and brought up in 1992, hailing from Bhopal, MP India. He graduated With a Bachelors in Design from IIT Guwahati in 2016. He has pursued his interests in the field of eastern arts and design by taking up various art forms such as Thangka, Manga and primarily now working in the anime industry. He loves physics, hiking, and dogs! and creates music in his free time.
​
Find more at https://www.behance.net/kushsquare
​