Bio

Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. As the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants who landed in a tiny town of 350 people, she grew up with no models of how she fit within American culture. Her family didn't have TV and the internet didn't yet exist, so she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills with a backpack full of books (she still does this). This fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice.

Tessa went quietly and happily feral in 2011 after a 5,000 mile solo bike ride from southern California to Maine, and her restlessness has joyously dragged her across all seven continents. Her travels have led to everything from bartending in Antarctica to painting murals in Ghana to hosting book clubs in Denali National Park, but she currently splits her time between Juneau, AK and Seattle, WA (she likes rain).

Her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book, and the Libby Award (as in the beloved library app, as voted on by the nation's librarians-- which holds a special place in Tessa's heart) for best graphic novel. Feeding Ghosts was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. In spite of all this, she is still completely sure she is never making another book.

She instead intends to fuse her wilderness and creative lives by becoming an embedded comics journalist working with field scientists, Indigenous groups, and nonprofits doing work around ecological resilience and climate change in remote environments. Reach out if you want to work with her!

Tessa is a compulsive genre hopper who has worked in various capacities as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher, and researcher for organizations including The Washington Post, The Henry Art Gallery, The Rumpus, On the Boards, The Seattle Art Museum, Atlas Obscura, Microsoft Research, and others. She is the recipient of grants from The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, and a fellowship from The Robert B. McMillen Foundation. She received the 2021 Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and others. As the 2019 awardee of the PEN Northwest Margery Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, she spent 6.5 months living alone in a remote off grid cabin with no cell service or internet while writing the outline of Feeding Ghosts. She never fully left the woods and has no plans--or desire, or ability-- to truly re-domesticate.

Tessa used to write narrative vignettes about the hopes, dreams, longings and fears of Honeybucket portable toilets and might get back into that someday, and when not in Washington state, she can often be found (or deliberately not found) in Alaska.