Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Comics, Animation, Drawing
Website: mara-ramirez.com
Mara Ramirez is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and lifelong Bay Area resident based in San Francisco, California. Working primarily in comics and animation, Ramirez has built a practice centered on storytelling, community engagement, and the exploration of embodied experience. They are the creator of Flea (2025, Fieldmouse Press), a 132-page graphic novel that received critical acclaim for its loose, gestural approach to depicting a young queer protagonist navigating family, relationships, and the search for self-recognition.
In 2018, Ramirez co-founded Freak Comics Collective, a Bay Area–based comics collective that self-publishes anthologies and indie work, organizes community events, and tables at book fairs and comic festivals internationally. In 2020, they joined the effort to organize Soft Screen, an experimental animation screening series and social practice. Their short-form poetry comics have appeared in publications including Floss Editions, Irrelevant Press, and Freak Comics’ own imprint. In 2023, their webcomic whale fall received an Ignatz Award nomination for Outstanding Online Comics.
Ramirez serves as an instructor at Sharon Art Studio, San Francisco’s longstanding community art center in Golden Gate Park, and contributes illustrations for youth-authored stories at Chapter 510, a nonprofit literary organization in Oakland. In 2026, they completed a residency in the 2D Arts program at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
Ramirez’s practice is process-driven and somatic, centered on mark-making as a means of distorting and clarifying personal experience through emotion and memory. Their comics employ shifting visual registers — moving between gestural, near-abstract line work and more detailed naturalistic illustration — to convey inner states that resist easy narration. Recurring motifs draw from biological imagery: microbes, organ systems, organisms, and ecosystems serve as metaphorical frameworks for examining gender and embodiment as a nonbinary person, with biorhythms providing a recurring conceptual structure for exploring what Ramirez describes as the duality of their experience.
Across both comics and animation, their work ranges from poetic meditations on gender and dysphoria to bittersweet character studies in cartoon formats. They have described their approach as “graphic medicine,” using sequential narrative as a tool for processing intimacy, trauma, and healing. Ramirez’s practice is informed by their community-oriented collaborations through Freak Comics and Soft Screen, which reflect a commitment to building infrastructure for experimental comics and animation in the Bay Area.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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