About — Kruttika Susarla

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Kruttika Susarla is an illustrator and cartoonist from Andhra Pradesh, India, working across editorial illustration, picture books, and comics.

She graduated with an MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022. Her narrative work is bright, bold, and textural.

Kruttika’s work for The Freedom Sisters (Pratham Books, 2024) won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators and was a part of the Illustrators 67th Annual Exhibition. She collaborates with community-engaged organizations in the US and the Global South to create books, zines, and toolkits.

Her self-published comics tell stories of connection, community, and labour. Her comics have been exhibited internationally, including at the Erlangen Comic Salon in Germany and the Fumetto Comic Festival in Switzerland. In 2022, she won the Cartoonist Coop Minicomic award for Made in Heaven Inc. (self-published, 2021) and in 2025, she won the Paper Rocket Publishing award for Alexander’s Curse (2024).

Kruttika lives and works in the United States.

kruttikas[at]gmail.com
Instagram: @kruttika
Represented by Ed Maxwell for books and publishing (outside India).
ed[at]transatlanticagency.com

Residencies / Fellowships/Grants

Foundation House, Connecticut | 2024
Making Policy Public | Center for Urban Pedagogy, New York | 2019-20
Indo-German Spring Comic Residency | Goethe Institut, Bangalore | 2016

Clients include: Interrupting Criminalization, The New Yorker, UN Women, Washington University in St. Louis, Illustoria, Google, Washington Post, The New York Times, AARP, Urgent Action Fund Asia & Pacific, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Human Rights Watch, Stop AAPI Hate, The Society of Illustrators, Positive Negatives | SOAS, Penguin Randomhouse, Pratham Books, Rutgers NL, Speaking Tiger, Goethe Institut