Who we are, what we do
Hi comics family!
We recently sent out a network-wide survey asking our members how we can better-serve our online community. It meant a lot to get so many meaningful responses to our questions and it was affirming to hear that, for the most part, we’re on the right track. Now we’re considering everything that was said and are building it into our plans for the future.
One of the things that came up was a question about who exactly we are and how we operate. A lot of this information can be found by venturing over to our website, but it seemed like a good chance to re-introduce ourselves.
SAW is a non-profit school founded by Tom Hart in 2011. We have an in-person school in Gainesville, Florida, for 10 years. And while we’ve been offering online classes since 2017, it was only in 2020 that we were forced to focus all our energy online and our team has grown (exponentially even?!).
Tom (our Executive Director) and Emma (Assistant Executive Director - that’s me) oversee the general operations in person and online, as well as create and facilitate programs.
We’re supported in our online network by moderators and instructors Karlo Antunes, Beth Trembley and Barry Sawicki, as well as by a host of volunteers including Dante Hookey, Donna Druchunas, Michael Aschner, and Erin Fitzgerald, plus a bunch of people who generously share their time and skills in the network (I know AJ Delp, Libby Dean and Jeff Eggleston have been an indescribable help to the Thursday Draw Jams).
All of us have gone through various SAW programs and have hung around because we believe in the power of comics and the importance of making affordable art education accessible to anyone and everyone. We bring professional and passionate experience from various comics-adjacent fields, and completely unrelated fields, too.
We have a board of directors that is made of predominantly Gainesville-based individuals who have come to SAW from various walks of life. We hope for this to be a working board that reflects the needs of both in person and online programs. With the return to in person programs in September this year, the board has been a really important part of developing COVID-safe practices, and responding directly to concerns about institutional power in arts and education.
This year we’re focusing on bringing a bunch of emerging and established comics professionals to our in person and online programs as instructors including Josh Bayer, Hyena Hell, Rob Clough, Ayanni Cooper, Jess Rulifsson and Lauren Weinstein. They join our established instructors like Tom, Beth, Justine, and Sidney.
We’re rebuilding our in person programs starting with our Teaching Residency program. In the 2021-22 school year we will host Andi Santagata, Casey Nowak and Melanie Gillman to teach our full immersion year long students.
Response to in person class exercise by Elli Rhodes during Andi Santagata’s teaching residency.
In 2022 we will host a series of visiting artists to teach our special weeklong workshops and summer teen program.
Every month we host a guest artist to share their industry experience. In 2021 alone we’ve been joined by Sophie Yanow, Sam Alden, Katherine Woodman-Maynard, Miranda Harmon, Annie Mok and Matt Madden. It's really important to us that we share industry experience beyond what our teaching staff have accumulated in the hopes we can paint a clearer a picture of what it means to make comics right now.
In the interest of transparency I’m going to try my best to create a monthly update of what we’re doing here at SAW so you get to see more of how we work, what we do behind the scenes and why comics are so important to us.
It’s really clear that many of you share our passion for comics and want to help build the comics utopia we all dream of. Thank you for being apart of our community. Please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions. This has been a long post! Thanks for sticking with me!
- Emma @ SAW
