Berlin Comics Exchange 2025

Esther Samuels-Davis is a freelance illustrator and author living in Berlin since 2013. She likes to make comics that explore the emotions that lie under, around and all throughout our natural world. While self-publishing many of her own books and zines under the name Dirty like the Weeds, her first and second published books, Togetherverse and Tumbo in the Shadows, were released in 2019 and 2022 by taotime books.

Yevheniia Zakharchuk is an illustrator and comic artist who creates humorous and relatable comics that capture the quirks of everyday life. Her work often reflects urban experiences, personal encounters, and contemporary dating culture with a playful color palette and minimalist character design.

Originally from South America, Maria Victoria Rodriguez has been living in Berlin for five years. She likes drawing very much, she studied art and animation. She works mostly as an illustrator, but also makes comics and fanzines. Her work deals mostly with themes of everyday life that inspire her, human relationships and often with her experience as a migrant woman.

Anna Paßlick’s original interest in comics awoke really late. Even though she always loved drawing, she didn’t read comics as a kid and only found them a couple of years ago when she was a teacher in social anthropology at the university. Today, she is super curious to explore social and political questions with her comics and tries to render complex information more accessible in non-fiction comics, while also exploring what the world might look like otherwise.

Currently, she is working for the first time on a longer fictional story that tells a story of grief and loss, but also intergenerational friendship between the two lesbian women Odelie (in her 60s) and Greg (in her 30s). The story is very close to her heart and she is super happy to work on it, also, because the research process for it has already brought a lot of new connections into her life and she thinks, in the end, the reason why she makes comics is because she loves the way that people can connect over and through stories.

Erinç Kargan is a comic artist based in Berlin who creates visuals that explore storytelling across various mediums, and both writes and illustrates his own stories. He wrote and drew two short horror stories, both self-published. His work mainly reflects his obsessions like manga, horror and monsters.

Nova de Hoo is a comic artist who wants to preserve the traditional elements of fun and irony in her comics, whilst also addressing social issues with care and sensitivity. She knows this is quite a difficult cocktail, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever fully get there!

She loves comics with her whole heart. Just like animation they are so incredibly concrete, and there’s no need to discuss a good comic because you don’t have to guess what it’s trying to convey, it’s just right there on the page.

As someone who is incredibly bad with abstraction and subjectivity, she loves the down-to-earth vibe that comics have. Currently she is writing a fictional story based on experiences she’s had in South Africa, hanging out with sex workers in Johannesburg and in doing so learning a bit about their struggles and dreams. In general she is drawn to feminist themes, and loves to write a little about her own experiences as a gay woman.

Masha Zotova is a Rotterdam based illustrator. Originally she came to the Netherlands to study graphic design but during the first year she realized that it wasn’t quite for her and comics were the crucial part of that transition. She used (and still uses) the medium as a diary and a way to process emotions and life changes.

Depicting her stories drawing herself as a character she felt more and more confident in the visual storytelling and the freedom it offers. Since then her visual language has taken many forms and changed into a more fluid narrative, where illustrations, text and story flows through the pages without necessarily being held by boxes and panels.

“It’s nice to look back at my years at the Academy and realise how much those first few comics defined me as an illustrator I am today. I am currently working on a comic book about goblins, a page of which you can see submitted below.”

Jolanda Dekker is a print-maker, illustrator and comic artist. She draws from her working class background to create whimsical, dreamy worlds, often combining her interest in politics and activism with her love for drawing. Recently she created her first graphic novel, Alienation – A Neoliberal Fairytale about a devil entering a utopia and slowly destroying it with neoliberal policies.

Celestine Kronberger (he/they) is a comic artist and illustrator based in Rotterdam. For them, comics are a lens through which they view the world—a way to make sense of a vast whole through small fragments and life’s vignettes. By looking closely, they aim to uncover truths, foster understanding, and learn through the practice of re-examining and re-contextualizing.

They believe comics create a unique space for reflection, which is why their work often centers on personal and social themes. Through this medium, they aim to invite readers into a space where they can reflect on their own experiences, offering a framework that allows them to navigate the story at their own pace.

Diede van Ommen makes personal comics, usually inspired by mental stress. She feels the need to draw – drawings depict her thought process which often includes some kind of shameful self-reflection that is meme-like and relatable.

She combines these personal struggles with an overseeing eye to the mechanics of power in late modernity (for which she laid the foundation in her studies in social sciences). She works with scrap paper to create panels and love creative/alternative publishing – playing with shapes, folds, etc.

Saskia van Amstel is an illustrator and independed publisher based in Rotterdam, making works about life and humans under the name Burning Desk. Ever since she lived and worked in Berlin for three years (where Burning Desk was born), she travels back and forth to Berlin to work from there, for inspiration, projects & friends.

Burning Desk’s works are inspired on sensitive social subjects like human behaviour/interaction, equality, climate change, mass production/consumption and animal cruelty. She is highly fascinated by how we as humans are affecting our surroundings and how this affects our earth, mental health and the way we treat each other. Her main goals are to spread more awareness about the subjects above to start an open conversation.

On behalf of Cross Comix she organized the Berlin Comic Exchange in collaboration with Renate Comics in Berlin, where comic artists have the chance to learn from each other and expand their International network. Making up and trying out new concepts together with others is something Saskia really likes, cause together you can do more than alone.

My colour doesn’t define me

In 2024 she published her first book ‘My colour doesn’t define me’, which is a book full with illustrations & comics about her personal experiences with racism and unconscious bias. With a love for (visual) books and as an indie publisher under the name: Burning Desk Books, she is trying to build an inclusive network for artists from minority groups, with a focus on makers of colour who (want to) publish books.

As an artist of colour herself, she would love to see more diversity and representation in her workfield. By organizing multiple events (in Berlin and The Netherlands) she hopes to make some small changes by offering a safe space, where publishers of colour can present their works and share their knowledge.