Dave Ortega
Lecturer
Contact
Bio
Dave Ortega (he/him) was born in El Paso, Texas where he began my art education and discovered the passion for narrative storytelling through comics.
Ortega's self-published comic book series Días de Consuelo is about the early life of his grandmother who was born during the Mexican Revolution. Those issues were collected, edited and published as a graphic novel by Radiator Comics. Días de Consuelo was selected by Society of Illustrators for their Illustration 65 annual.
His original comics pages are in the collections of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles (opening in 2025) and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.
Dave is a 2021 grantee of the Collective Futures Fund, a program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a recipient of multiple artist grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His comics have been published in several periodicals and anthologies, including Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology, New Frontiers: The Many Worlds Of George Takei, Irene Book 5, and Beautiful/Decay Book 6. An excerpt of Días de Consuelo appeared in the Illustrated PEN section of the PEN America site.
Other self-published publications include a short comic about his grandmother’s teenage years living on the Rio Grande (River), historical works about the Mexican Revolution (Battle of Juarez and Zacatecas 1 and 2), a zine about U.S. influence in Central and South American governments (School of the Americas), and a short series of illustrated Latin American sayings (Dichos 1 and 2).
Ortega was invited to create "Comics: Frame by Frame", an interactive educational comics project in collaboration at the Art Lab at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. He has exhibited his comics at many international fairs, notably Toronto Comic Arts Fair, Comic Arts Brooklyn, New York Art Book Fair, Boston Art Book Fair, Small Press Expo, and Latino Comics Expo.
He lives near Boston and divides his time between comics, illustration, and teaching various workshops in the area and as Adjunct Faculty at Lesley University in the Illustration and Art History departments.