Phoebe Gloeckner is a cartoonist, graphic novelist, visual artist, and author. She was born in Philadelphia and raised in San Francisco and graduated with an M.A. in Biomedical Communications from the University of Texas.
Her books include "A Child’s Life and Other Stories" and "The Diary of a Teenage Girl; an Account in Words and Pictures".
In a New York Times profile, author Peggy Orenstein said, “Gloeckner is arguably the brightest light among a small cadre of semi-autobiographical cartoonists who are creating some of the edgiest work about young women’s lives in any medium.”
Cartoonist R. Crumb called her story, "Minnie’s Third Love" (published in "A Child’s Life and Other Stories") one of the “comicbook masterpieces of all time”.
Gloeckner's, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" (2002), was praised as "one of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender, beautiful portrayals of growing up female in America".
It was adapted for the screen and produced as a film in 2015. Directed by Marielle Heller, and starring Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, and Kristen Wiig, the film opened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Gloeckner's books have been published in multiple languages and her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe.
Gloeckner worked prolifically as a medical illustrator since 1988, and her training is evident in her paintings and comics art, which are highly detailed and often prominently feature the human body. Her first prominent work in fiction publishing, a series of illustrations for the RE/Search edition of J.G. Ballard's novel "The Atrocity Exhibition", used clinical images of internal anatomy, sex, and physical trauma in ambiguous and evocative combinations.
Her early comics work, in the form of short stories published in a variety of underground anthologies including "Wimmen's Comix", "Weirdo","Young Lust" and "Twisted Sisters".
Many of her stories are semi-autobiographical, a frequent cause of comment due to their depiction of sex, drug use, and childhood traumas; however, Gloeckner has stated that she regards them as fiction.
In 2008, Gloeckner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue work on an on-going project centering on the life of the family of a murdered teenager living in Ciudad Juárez, several hundred feet from the US-Mexico border. Throughout and preceeding the escalation and gradual recession of the current period of intense violence in the city (3,200+ homicides in 2010), Gloeckner has been observing the evolution of the family, the case of their daughter’s murder, and the neighborhood they live in. The end product of this process will be several novels.
This image and sub-text is from an 8-04-04 LA Times article called "Time to Shout": Artist traveled to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to document the killings of young women there. This illustration will carry the explanation: "Identity unknown. The body of a woman, approximately 16 years old, was discovered on the 21st of March, 1997 at 19:00 hours, near the labor camps in the El Sauz Nuevo population."
Ms. Gloeckner is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art & Design. She completed a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2021 and is a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers.
In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, Comics Alliance listed Gloeckner as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition
