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Bruno Bozzetto (born 3 March 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an Italian cartoon animator, creator of many short pieces, mainly of a political or satirical nature. He created his first animated short “Tapum! the weapons’ story” in 1958 at the age of 20. His most famous character, a hapless little man named “Signor Rossi” (Mr. Rossi), has been featured in many animated shorts as well as starring in three feature films: “Mr. Rossi Looks for Happiness” (1976), “Mr. Rossi’s Dreams” (1977), and “Mr. Rossi’s Vacation” (1977).
In 1965, Bozzetto produced his first feature-length animated film: West and soda, a parody of American Western films. In 1968, Bozzetto released VIP my Brother Superman, a superhero spin-off.
However, his best-known work is probably the 1976 feature film Allegro non troppo, a montage of short pieces set to classical music in the manner of Disney’s Fantasia, but more humorous in nature, economical in execution and with more sophisticated narrative themes. After a long break, Bozzetto produced a live-action film in 1987, “Under the Chinese Restaurant”, his last feature film work until assisting on the pilot for “Mammuk” (2002), an animated film set in prehistoric times (now being produced by Rai Cinema and The Animation Band).
1990 saw the release of Grasshoppers (Cavallette), which was a nominee for the Best Animated Short Oscar.
In 1995, he produced an animated short for Hanna Barbera’s “What A Cartoon” series entitled “Help?” and in 1996, in cooperation with RAI and with the support of Cartoon (Media Programme of the European Union), he created “The Spaghetti Family” a 26-episode cartoon television series.
In recent years Bozzetto has turned his hand to flash cartoons, most notably with the award-winning “Europe and Italy”, a witty and graphically elegant commentary on European vs. Italian sociocultural attributes.

Bruno Bozzetto’s Cartoon for “Iranian Green International Cartoon Exhibition”

Awards (selected recent)

(2003) Bergamo International Cinema Festival: Career award (Premio delle mura)
(2000) Zagreb Film Festival: Special Jury Award “for original observation of human diversity”
(1998) Zagreb 13th World Festival of Animated Films: Life Achievement Award “for outstanding and universal contribution to the development of the art of animation”

Misha Zlatkovsky is a political cartoonist and illustrator living in Moscow, but his original education was on the field of nuclear physics.
He had been preparing for his Doctor of Science thesis, when in 1971, because of political reasons, he suddenly quit all his research and became a freelance artist/cartoonist. Almost immediately, he started participating in international cartoon competitions and soon became a familiar face on the cartoon world’s horizon. He has won over 200 honours, about 50 of which grand and first prizes.

In the early to mid-90s, he lived in the United States, then moved back to Moscow, where he became a professor at Moscow State University as well as chief art director for a group of national magazines and newspapers. He is an honorary member of the French Academy of Humorous Art, the International Academy of Education, and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Masters.

His successful international performance became a natural source for invitations to preside over and/or be a member of cartoon/art juries in many countries. His professional association memberships include the Artists Union of the former USSR and the Russian Federation, the Union of Russian Journalists, and the Graphic Artists Union of Moscow.

His one-man shows graced the galleries of Belgium, Canada, Estonia, France, Italy, Malta, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and the United States.

Godfrey Amon 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.

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.

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.

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.

Khalil Abu Arafeh is a political cartoonist at the leading Palestinian newspaper al-Quds. A father of four, Abu Arafeh was born in Jerusalem’s Old City,
the son of an upholsterer who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1980s, the group’s leaders in Gaza founded the Islamic Resistance Movement better known as Hamas, which is now, as the governing party, his primary target as a political cartoonist.

While an architecture student in Kiev, Ukraine, in the early 1980s, Abu Arafeh began sending samples of his cartoons to newspaper editors in the Palestinian territories.

Later he returned home and began working as a cartoonist, first at the now-defunct al-Fajr newspaper, while also practicing architecture. He served 14 months in an Israeli jail for belonging to the outlawed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

After years of focusing on Israel and the occupation, Abu Arafeh has in the last decade taken on the Palestinian leadership.

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 politics to the most banal aspects of relationships, 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 childrens series of seven dinosaur books for Scholastic, Inc., which together sold over two million copies. Donnelly also wrote Funny Ladies: The New Yorkers Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, a book about the history of the women cartoonists of The New Yorker. She is currently writing a book on the history of cartoons and comics. Donnelly is a frequent lecturer, and is on the faculty at Vassar College.

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.

(Photo credit: Cynthia Delconte)

Cabu (real name Jean Cabut is a French comic strip artist and carticaturist. He served in the Army during the Algerian Civil War, and during this time, he drew for the army newspaper, Bled. One of the founders of Hara-Kiri magazine. In the 70s and 80s, he became a very popular artist, collaborating for a time with the children’s TV programme, Récré A2. He continued working in political caricature for Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard enchaîné.

In February of 2006 one of his cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared in a French newspaper, causing much controversy.

From September 2006 to January 2007, an exhibition entitled Cabu and Paris has been organized by Hôtel de Ville, Paris.

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.

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.

Tamer Youssef  was born 1974 in Cairo; he began working for local newspapers at an early age. His work has appeared in Le Progrés Egyptien, The Egyptian Gazette, Live Colors, Al Ahram Hebdo, La Revue d’Egypt, Al-Ahram Weekly in Egypt, as well as in publications in France, Romania, and the United States.

His work has been shown in Egypt, Korea, France, Cyprus, USA, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia EU, Holland, Macedonia, Italy, Iran, Poland, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Syria and Taiwan.

Different Awards too in Taiwan, Korea, Cyprus and Egypt.

He organized so many international cartoon events in Egypt such as:

• The Environmental Cartoon Competition – Cairo 1998
• Cairo International Cartoon Competition – Cairo 2003
• Bonjour la Caricature! – Alexandria 2003

that’s why he invite the most important cartoonists around the world to attend my events such:

• Dr. Mark Briant – England (Secretary of the London Press Club).
• Tayo Fatunla (Nigerian Cartoonist illustrator and Cartoon tutor creator of the popular OUR ROOTS).
• Jean Plantu (French cartoonist of Le Monde).

He is currently vice president of the Federation of Cartoonists Organizations (FECO) – Egypt Group. As well I’m member of:

• The Egyptian Association for caricature
• Syndicate of Plastic Arts
• Egyptian National Committee
• International Association of Art

“Caricature by Tamer Youssef”, is his  first and only collection, appeared in Egypt in 2003.

His  latest exhibitions in Egypt were:

“Spring of Secrets” – Painting exhibition at Cairo Opera House | January 2005.

“The Political Caricature of Tamer Youssef” – cartoon exhibition at Al-Ahram establishment art gallery | April 2005.

His exhibitions and activities in the United States:

Shows:

“le Monde de Caricature de Tamer Youssef” – Cartoon Solo Exhibition at the Alliance Française of San Francisco | San Francisco | California | April 2008.

“le Monde de Caricature de Tamer Youssef 2” – Cartoon Solo Exhibition at the Alliance Française of San Francisco | San Francisco | California | January-February 2008.

“The Egyptian Cultural Day” – Group Exhibition at San Francisco State University | Cartoon Exhibition | San Francisco | California | November 2007-2008.

“The Egyptian Cultural Days” – Group Exhibition at the Arab and Community Center in San Francisco | Cartoon Exhibition | San Francisco | California | March 2008 and 2009.

He represent Egypt during the international day of the International House of UC Berkeley | Berkeley | California | April 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Academic:

He had a presentation for my artwork at Saratoga Library organized by the Arab American Cultural Center of Silicon Valley at San Jose (AACC) and the Egyptian Consulate General – Press and Information Bureau | San Jose | California | July 2008.

He lectured at the International House of UC Berkeley during the Globalization Program about “Sketches and Dialogues” | Berkeley | California | November 2007.

He lectured at the City College of San Francisco about Sketches and Dialogues 2 “Pure Improvisation” | San Francisco | California | February 2008.

He lectured at Foothill College about Sketches & Dialogues 3 “Pure Improvisation” | Los Altos Hills | California | January 2009.

He lectured at San Jose City College about Sketches & Dialogues 4 “Pure Improvisation” | San Jose | California | April 2009.

He lectured at Foothill College about Sketches & Dialogues 5 “Pure Improvisation” | Los Altos Hills | California | September 2009.

Pran Kumar Sharma (born August 15, 1938), better known as Pran, is one of the most successful Indian cartoonists.

Pran graduated with a Master of Arts (Political Science) degree. He then completed a four-year course in Fine Arts from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai.

Pran began his career in 1960 as a cartoonist for the Delhi-based newspaper Milap with comic strip Daabu. In 1969, he sketched Chacha Chaudhary for the Hindi magazine Lotpot, which made him famous. Pran has also created other cartoon characters like Shrimatiji, Pinki, Billoo, Raman, Channie Chachi and others, which are regularly published in Indian magazines.

Maurice Horn, the editor of World Encyclopedia of comics, has described him as “Walt Disney of India” in World Encyclopedia of comics.

He’s creator of Chacha Chaudhary, Saabu, Billu, Pinki, Shrimatiji, Raman, Ankur, Channi Chachi etc.

Nigar Nazar, the first woman cartoonist of Pakisan and perhaps the entire Muslim world, has for over 30 years rendered pictorial humor with a down to earth pragmatism. These highly expressive cartoons have provided cheer to gloomy days and attempt to beat the hypocrisy of society. Gogi cartoons have appeared in newspapers, magazines and television around the world. Recently her cartoons have been put on the exterior of seven buses in Pakistan. The children all want to ride the colourful “Gogi-bus.”

For her charitable work, Nigar has recieved many commendations and honors from organizations such as: Unicef, UNDP, Media Watch Newsleter, Bishtek International School, Kinnard College for Women, International Charity Group Maputo, The Word Festival of Australia, Pan Pacific, and South East Asia Women’s Association.

Currently, Nigar is working on a new book; According to her a very useful book for graduates who need to find a job. This is being prepared for the students of the University of Oregon, where Nigar has arrived as a Fulbright Scholar. She is afficliated with the art department at the University of Oregon.