Julia Nascimento lived in Brazil until 2010, where she conducted research related to art and literature. After earning a BA degree in Fine Arts, she was awarded with the Japanese Ministry of Education, MEXT, scholarship, and relocated to Tokyo, to be part of a postgraduate program in fashion. While researching about fashion illustration, she started working with commercial illustration and collaborating with local creatives in Tokyo. Her first collaboration project was with her partner; together they created FE&JUada Comics, an autobiographical work exploring their journey being “the other” in a foreign land, told through slice of life short stories. One of the stories was selected for the comics anthology competition Wake Up, published by Centrala. Shortly after Julia started self-publishing her visual narratives, and working in editorial and curatorial collaborative projects with the international comics community. One of these projects is ToCo – the Tokyo Collective, a collaborative project in which guest artists are invited to tell visual stories about a selected theme, producing a printed anthology and a group exhibition for each theme. Parallel to ToCo, she also co-founded the Sequential Art Meetup – Comics and Visual Storytelling, in which events were held monthly in 2018 with guest speakers giving talks related to comics and visual storytelling, and providing a space for the international comic community in Tokyo to meet, share, and collaborate.

During her time at the residency, Julia Nascimento will develop short visual stories, experimenting with narratives of the mundane yet complex world of human relationships. She will also pursue opportunities for future collaborations.

Julia Nascimento is a Brazilian born illustrator and comics artist with art, fashion, and research backgrounds. She has a multidisciplinary approach in her work to tell stories through images. She self-publishes her comics and visual stories, and she is the co-founder of ToCo – the Tokyo Collective, and the CANVAS Sequential Art Meetup in Tokyo, Japan.

Artist in Residence during
2019-08-01 – 2019 -10-31
2019-12-01 – 2020-12-31