Author and Multidisciplinary Artist
Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, adventurer, and comics journalist. In Feeding Ghosts, her genre-defying graphic memoir, (2024, MCD) Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school–and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.
Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi’s unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe. But she was unable to escape the family ghosts that were haunting her until she returned home to face the history that shaped their lives.
Tessa’s fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock
of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice. 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, working in various capacities as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher, and researcher. She is equally likely to disappear into a research library or the wilderness.
In addition to talks based on her graphic memoir, she is available to speak about feminist history, with an emphasis on the intersection of female adventurers and social change. ‘She Traveled Solo: Strong Women in the Early 20th Century’
showcases the lives of seven extraordinary women who lived through the turn of the century, and ‘Cycling Through Barriers’ explores the 150-year story of the bicycle as a means of empowerment for women and people of color.
Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura,and Adventure
Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and The Margins. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Robert B McMillen Foundation, and received the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and others.
“Tessa Hulls is a neuron igniter. Weaving together history, humor, illustrations, and exhaustive research, she brings to life in her talks corners of human and natural history you never knew you cared so deeply about. Tessa’s presentations float in a delightful nexus of narrative, comedy, art show, lecture, with the prowess of your all-time most entertaining dinner party guest, defying boxed categorization by any one form. You leave a Tessa talk sizzling with curiosity, appreciation for the unnoticed and unseen, and alive to the possibilities of stories all around us.”
-Alicia
Craven, Seattle Arts & Lectures, Writers in the Schools program