About

Photo circa 1985, by my mom

Gretchen is a visually-based storyteller working in comics, puppetry, and curation. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2023 she was a comics artist residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; and later that year she debuted The Thing With Wings, Chapter One of her ongoing puppetry saga The Dinosaur Opera, created while in residence at the Puppet Lab program of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. Her solo performance The Knee Play premiered in 2024 at the Physical Theater Festival’s Scratch Night at Theater Wit in Chicago, and then showed at the Nasty, Brutish, and Short cabaret during the 2025 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. In 2024 She premiered With Their Very Bones, Chapter Two of The Dinosaur Opera, at Aloft Circus Arts in Chicago. In March 2025 she premiered The Dinosaur Opera Chapter Three, History and Time, at Chicago’s Beverly Arts Center.

Gretchen is a co-founder of Agitator Artists’ Collective, where her notable curation includes 2019’s Everything Has Changed: Life Altering Medical Experiences in 21st Century USA. Her 2020 book-based exhibition, And Then: Stories About What Happens Next, is an invited contribution to the collection Documenting Contemporary Social Life Shaped by the Covid-19 Pandemic and Racial Justice Movements, at the Field Museum in Chicago. She was Visual Gallery Curatorial Resident at Elastic Arts from 2021 - 2022. In 2024 she mounted Comics on the Radio, an accessible, live radio play interpretation of the fourth volume of Agitator Comics!, an annual compilation she has curated since 2021. In 2025, she co-curated Narratives of Flesh, mounted at The International Museum of Surgical Science, with fellow 3Arts awardee Genevieve Ramos.

Gretchen has received a 2021 3Arts Make A Wave grant; a 2022 VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Fellowship for Writing Residency at SAFTA in Knoxville; and a 2022 Esteemed Artist Grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She participated in the 2025 Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, focusing on speculative nonfiction. She teaches art and writing at Saint Xavier University in Chicago.