Israeli, b. 1966 Born in Israel and trained at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Rutu Modan is the defining voice of the Israeli graphic novel. Her path was fundamentally altered after a pivotal meeting with Art Spiegelman, which inspired her to champion sequential art in a country where the medium was not yet recognized as a serious narrative form. In 1995, she co-founded the Actus Tragicus collective, an avant-garde movement that successfully established Hebrew comics on the international stage and earned her the title of outstanding artist from the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. Modan’s aesthetic is a sophisticated evolution of the "Clear Line" (Ligne Claire) style made famous by Hergé’s Tintin. She utilizes this crisp, accessible visual language to explore intensely complex and often painful sociopolitical realities. Her breakout work, Exit Wounds (2007), examined the fallout of terrorist attacks, while The Property (2013) delved into the generational memory of the Holocaust. Her 2021 masterpiece, Tunnels, used the framework of a situation comedy to offer a biting, brilliant critique of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the archaeological obsessions that fuel it. The global impact of Modan's work is reflected in her numerous accolades, including multiple Eisner Awards and the Jury Prize at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Beyond her graphic novels, she is a prolific illustrator for the New York Times and a celebrated creator of children’s literature, with several titles published through Françoise Mouly’s Toon Books. By blending the "polite" visual clarity of European tradition with the raw, urgent complexities of Middle Eastern life, Modan has created a body of work that is as globally resonant as it is deeply personal.