Susan Simensky Bietila

Susan Simensky Bietila is a Milwaukee based activist artist. She is known primarily for her graphic non-fiction, published in the annual comics anthology, World War 3 Illustrated magazine, which she often co-edits. She also makes puppets which are carried by Water Protectors in communities where the waters are at risk from mining and pipelines. She works in scratchboard and ink, block prints, photography, silkscreen, cardboard sculpture and applique, and her stories often start with her own experience. Born in 1947, and growing up in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the famed High School of Music & Art, Brooklyn College in the age of Abstract Expressionism and much later UW-Milwaukee, studying printmaking and photography. She is also a retired RN, and finally free to do artwork all the time. Her first solo book, Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance is out from PM Press.