Dana Walrath

Art, writing, anthropology. These are more connected than they might seem. Dana likes to use them as tools for exploring the edges and margins that make up our lives. With a spirit of curiosity, compassion, and humor, she weaves together her experience in these arenas to broach a new genre of graphic medicine. Walrath first discovered the connections between comics and medicine after years of using stories and art to teach students at University of Vermonts College of Medicine. Her decision to take a leave from that work to care for her Armenian mother through dementia proved to be a pivotal one, and spawned Aliceheimers (Harvest 2013), a graphic memoir about life with Alice, before and during the illness. Aliceheimers crossed many boundaries, with reflections on aging, the caretakers role, and ancestral memory.  
It also led Dana to spend 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar in Armenia, where she drew and wrote stories about aging in the south Caucasus. In 2013, she returned there to speak about comics and medicine at TEDx Yerevan. Dana has shown her artwork in a variety of venues in North America and Europe and is co-author of one of the leading college textbook series in Anthropology. Her verse novel, Like Water on Stone, (Delacorte Press 2014) tells the story of three siblings who survive genocide through creativity and imagination. - See more at: http://www.tedxbattenkill.org/displaywp_project/dana-walrath/#sthash.cDJTTemp.dpuf