Bio

Gretchen is a storyteller working in comics, writing, murals, curation, installation and puppetry. She received her MFA in Film, Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She co-founded Chicago’s Agitator Artists’ Collective in 2017, and served as Director from 2023 - 2025. 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.

In 2017, her design Resilience was chosen for Rogers Park’s Mile of Murals. Her other murals include Hazel and Zorro at the Logan Square Dog Park, an effort designed and coordinated by AnySquared Projects; Displacement, with Project Logan; Storytime at the Lifeline Theater; and Fix It Yourself at the Chicago Women in Trade training facility.

Gretchen has been awarded residencies at Buinho Fab Lab in Messejana, Portugal; Puppet Lab through the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival; Sundance Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee; Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea; and the Trinacria Performance Festival in Pezzolo, Sicily. She attended Lisbon’s DISQUIET International literary program in 2025 and 2026.

She is currently developing the Dinosaur Opera, a multi-chapter puppet saga exploring the deep past and deep future, and how we understand both in the present day. She premiered Chapter 1, The Thing with Wings, at the Chopin Theatre in 2023. Chapter Two, With Their Very Bones, premiered in 2024 at Aloft Circus Arts’ October Communion. Chapter Three, History and Time, debuted at the Beverly Arts Center in March 2025.

Gretchen 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 teaches art and writing at Saint Xavier University in Chicago.