GINA SICILIANO
IS AN ARTIST, MUSICIAN, AND HISTORIAN LIVING IN SEATTLE, WA
She is the author of the graphic novel I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi, a biography of Italy’s most famous woman painter of the seventeenth-century. This groundbreaking synthesis of academic research and ballpoint pen art took seven years to complete.
I Know What I Am was released in the fall of 2019 by beloved local publisher Fantagraphics. Since then, Siciliano has been lecturing about Artemisia and sharing the story of this project with various museums, schools, and media, from the Seattle Art Museum, to the BBC’s Radio 3, to the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, to Portland Community College, and more. In 2020 I Know What I Am won an Independent Publisher Award, an American Librarians Association award, and was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award.
Siciliano graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2007, where she studied oil painting, anatomical drawing, and figure sculpture. She self-published an ongoing queer feminist zine called So What, and then self-published two graphic novellas—The Roaming Heart (2009) and SummerTime (2011). She’s also continued oil painting, primarily portraiture, often utilizing early modern and Caravaggesque techniques.
Siciliano is the drummer and vocalist for two different rock bands—MegaTiger and Oixoi. She and her three bandmates have been jamming in a crusty warehouse for nearly ten years, recording and playing shows in venues such as Café Racer, Vera Project, Highline, 9 Pound Hammer, Benbow Room, and more. Both bands play original songs that they write together, transcending genre by experimenting with folk, blues, grunge, punk, riot grrrl, and noisy garage sounds.
Siciliano has been carless for most of her adult life, regularly bicycling from one end of the city to the other. She’s also a fixture within Seattle’s used bookstore scene, working at various shops where she’s determined to get good books into people’s hands. She lives in a one-hundred-year-old building full of plants, books, and records, with no streaming services and no social media. She’s currently out in the streets protesting, working on a series of new essay comics, and honing her grant writing skills to obtain more support for her next historical graphic novel…