EVENTS
Elise Dietrich has been making autobiographical and memoir comics since 2016. Her work draws on the everyday — parenthood, travel, craft, memory, and the particular experience of moving between cultures — rendered in an intimate, diary-comics style that invites readers into the texture of a life in progress.
Her comics include Kill Your Idols, an ongoing graphic memoir about reckoning with the rock and roll heroes of adolescence; Key West Diary, a five-day travel diary that finds magic and difficulty in equal measure; Making Time, a Kickstarter-funded collection of diary comics about creative practice; and the Grandes Expectativas series, which explores her complicated love for Brazil.
She teaches Comics and Sequential Art at Wheaton College — a studio course where students make their own original comics — and has led workshops and participated in panels at the Non-Fiction Comics Festival, the Graphic Medicine Conference, and community spaces throughout Rhode Island.
She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Tulane University — which explains why Brazil keeps showing up in her comics.
Kill Your Idols (Part One: Fandom, 2024 — Part Two coming 2026) A graphic memoir about reckoning with the rock and roll heroes of your adolescence — from the vantage point of middle age. Buy on Etsy
How Brazil Can Be (Grandes Expectativas, 2024) The latest issue in an ongoing memoir series about her complicated love for a country that isn't hers. Buy on Etsy
Pandemic Parade (2022) Five stories about making do, finding humor, and holding onto humanity during lockdown. Buy on Etsy
Key West Diary (2019, reprinted 2022) A travel memoir about five days in Florida with a young daughter — bikes, beaches, old friends, and a surprisingly political encounter. Buy on Etsy
“Rock-solid cartooning, a remarkable penchant for making mundanities suddenly interesting… This, friends, is what we call SKILLED comics storytelling.”
”A gem of a comic… polished and sparkling thanks to Dietrich’s superb narrative and visual choices.”
Show History
2025 · Paper Beach, Providence RI (co-organizer)
2022–2025 · Small Press Expo (SPX), Bethesda MD
2023–2024 · Non-Fiction Comics Festival, Burlington VT
2023 · Denver Comics and Arts Festival
2018, 2023 · Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE), Boston MA
2019 · CAKE Chicago
Teaching & Community
Elise also organizes and co-hosts PVD Drink & Draw, a monthly drop-in drawing event in Providence, Rhode Island, 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 occasionally leads workshops and participates in panels. Get in touch to discuss opportunities.