Elise Dietrich makes autobiographical and memoir comics about the texture of everyday life — parenthood, travel, craft, and the particular experience of carrying two cultures inside you at once. She has been drawing comics since 2016, and her work has been described as "rock-solid cartooning" with "a remarkable penchant for making mundanities suddenly interesting" by Ryan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse.
Her comics include Kill Your Idols, an ongoing graphic memoir about reckoning with the rock and roll heroes of adolescence; Pandemic Parade, five stories about holding onto humanity during lockdown; Key West Diary, a travel memoir about a trip to Florida with her young daughter; Making Time, a Kickstarter-funded diary comics collection; and the Grandes Expectativas series, which explores her complicated love for Brazil, a country that isn't hers. Her work is available in her Etsy shop and on Gumroad.
She organizes and hosts PVD Drink & Draw, a monthly drop-in drawing event in Providence, now in its third year. She teaches Comics and Sequential Art at Wheaton College — a studio course where students make their own original comics — and has participated in panels at the Non-Fiction Comics Festival and the Graphic Medicine Conference.
She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Tulane University — which explains a lot about why Brazil keeps showing up in her comics.
Originally from New Hampshire, she has lived in Brazil, Boston, New Orleans, the Hudson Valley, and Boulder, Colorado. She currently lives with her family in Warren, Rhode Island.