Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics artist, visual artist and musician born in Beirut in 1975. Kerbaj has authored over 15 books, and many of his short stories and drawings have been published in local and international anthologies, newspapers and magazines. His work has been translated into more than ten languages and has been shown in galleries, museums and art fairs around the globe.
Mazen Kerbaj is widely considered as one of the initiators and key players of the Lebanese free improvisation and experimental music scene. He is the co-founder of Irtijal, an annual improvisational music festival, and of Al Maslakh, the first label for experimental music in the region. As a trumpet player, Kerbaj pushes the boundaries of the instrument and continues to develop a personal sound and an innovative language.

George Khoury is a renowned Lebanese comics artist and critic. He has published several comic albums (graphic novels) and series in daily newspapers since the 1980s and received several awards. He authored several articles and essays on the history of comics in the Arab world, and continues to write critically on comics from the region. He has been head of the Animation Department at Future Television since its launch in 1993, and teaches at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

Joan Baz is a Lebanese graphic designer and artist based in Beirut. Mainly focused on illustration, printmaking and animation, Joan’s work explores oral history, social practices, transmission and memory. Her recent project CD-R is an investigative audio platform, probing topics such as memory, displacement, and the built environment through voice notes, interviews, collected and produced sounds. She has a master’s degree from the French animation school, Supinfocom, and worked with several studios in Paris, London, Zagreb and Barcelona before returning to Beirut in 2012. Baz is an adjunct faculty at the Lebanese American University and is co-director of the Beirut Animated Festival. In 2015 she founded ‘Cardamon House,’ a design, animation and illustration studio with work spanning across different media and formats. Her illustration work has been published in The Guardian, The Outpost, Brownbook, MIT Technology, The Carton and Majallet Onboz magazines, and her short films ‘Fouad’ and ‘Dajeej’ have screened at festivals worldwide.

Chedly Belkhamsa is a renowned Tunisian editorial cartoonist and an art educator at the Tunis School of Fine Arts, with diverse experience in management, cinema, television and publishing. BeElkhamsa’s work has been featured in journals, on covers and posters, in films, cartoons and awareness campaigns for various issues such as Women, Environment, Health, Heritage, etc. His work has been exhibited both locally across the Tunisian Republic, and internationally in Algeria, Morocco, England, France, Canada, Switzerland and Turkey.
Belkhamsa has won numerous awards, including the Association of Tunisian Journalists Caricature Award in 1983, the International Festival of Caricature and Arab Cartoon Algeria Comics and Caricature award in 1987, the Children’s Theater Festival of Gabès Scenography Award for the play Le Puit in 2006, the University of Manouba Academia Press Freedom Award/free press award in 2013, and the Tunisian League of Citizenship Award in 2013.

Simona Gabrieli is a Swiss Italian linguist and Islamologist focusing on interactions among Mediterranean imaginaries. Gabrieli is the founder of Alifbata, a publishing house specialized in translating and publishing Arabic comic books since 2015. She has, as such, published the first graphic novel translated from Arabic to French: Yogurt and Marmelade by Lebanese author Lena Merhej. In 2018, she co-published, along with the American University of Beirut and Tosh Fesh, the book accompanying the exhibition ‘The New Generation, Arab Comics Today,’ which was launched during the opening of the exhibition at La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image d’Angoulême. Based in Marseille, Gabrieli has also worked extensively at realizing intercultural pedagogic projects.

Steve Bell has been drawing political comic strips for a living since 1977 and is a proponent of the short form. He has written and drawn the If… strip in the Guardian since 1981, and has been drawing up to four larger format political cartoons a week for the same paper since 1990. His work is unashamedly comic, but many of his cartoons are quite deliberately not funny at all. Born in London in 1951, he first studied art, later qualifying as a teacher before becoming a full-time cartoonist. His original strip Maggie’s Farm appeared in Time Out and City Limits magazines from 1979 through to 1987, and he produced regular cartoons in full color for the New Statesman from 1987 to 1999.
His work has been published worldwide, with thirty books of his own, and has won many awards, most notably the Political Cartoon of the Year in 2001, 2008 and 2013, the British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year in 2002, the Political Cartoon Society’s Cartoonist of the Year award twice, and the Cartoon Arts Trust Award ten times. His work has been exhibited internationally, with two retrospective exhibitions of his work: one at the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Germany and the other at the Cartoon Museum in London. He has been awarded honorary degrees from multiple universities.