Zine Fest Houston 2024

Zine Fest Houston, Texas's oldest self-publishing festival, returns once again to celebrate all things DIY! Our theme this year is ZINE-TOPIA/DYSTOPIA!

Based on current trends, it seems we may be at a crossroads. 🛣️🗺️Climate change, future pandemics, out of control AI, authoritarian politics, corporate plundering, environmental degradation, loss of political and reproductive rights, war, and others threaten life as we know it…could this herald some sort of dystopian hellscape?! Are we doomed!? 😨👹💀
We say 🙅🏽NO🙅🏻‍♀️⚠️THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE!⚠️We can come together and support each other, using our best reasoning and self-expression to draw on the power of community to apply our DIY mindset and develop sustainable, human-scale solutions to all of these problems and arrive at a utopia – nay, a ZINE-topia! 🫱🏼‍🫲🏾🌈☁️ JOIN US on November 16th from 12-6pm at the Orange Show for Visionary Art (2334 Gulf Terminal Dr.) to celebrate community, browse at almost 200 vendor tables, explore our theme, and enjoy an exciting variety of programs! Stay tuned for more details!
For more festival information, including our upcoming vendor list and map, please visit:
www.zinefesthouston.org

SAFER SPACES POLICY
Zine Fest Houston is FREE TO ALL, but please be aware that the festival has a zero tolerance policy for sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, or any other forms of discrimination and abuse taken against members of our community such as theft of money or property, physical, verbal, or mental abuse, sexual harassment, inappropriate/unwelcome comments and behaviors, disruptive or disrespectful behavior, and causing a participant or attendee to feel distressed or unsafe. We encourage everyone participating and attending to help us hold the festival up to the standard we have set, and to advise festival organizers if any issues arise in this regard during ZFH. Thank you!
ZFH ORGANIZERS

Patrick Brooks (he, him) is a Houston-based zine designer/publisher. His primary focus is a family-friendly invitational zine, hey everybody… Let’s make a zine! which he produces with his son, Davis. He has also created a zine for Aurora Picture Show’s twentieth anniversary, four editions of an activist zine targeted towards saving the River Oaks Theatre and various one-off projects.
María Heg (she/her) is a Houston-based cartoonist and co-organizer with Zine Fest Houston. When she isn't busy making sure her baby has enough food to launch across the room, she enjoys cooking, movies, going to museums, reading comics and telling all robots to shut the hell up. On IG @ohdonteven.
Anastasia “Stacy” Kirages (she/her) is a Houston-based collage artist, zinester, and community organizer. Currently, she runs a monthly collage meet-up group with artist Chasity Porter called Scissors of Texas/Tijeras de Tejas and has also been a lead organizer for Zine Fest Houston (ZFH) since 2013. In addition to her work with ZFH, she volunteers with Black & Pink, Girls Rock Camp Houston, and Montrose Grace Place. Check out more of her work on IG: @k.llages.
Ruben Ramires (he/they) is a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas, USA. His diverse work includes illustrations, poetry and acting. Ruben is currently working towards his BA in Illustration at Falmouth University. IG: @rubenramires

Sarah Welch is an artist, illustrator, and comics-maker. She is part of the printmaking duo Mystic Multiples and a co-organizer for literary & visual arts organization, Zine Fest Houston. Welch likes to garden, build things, play with clay, and haunt the thrift store. She is currently working with San Jacinto Community College theater on the original play, “The Pits,” about the Brio Superfund site in southeast Houston.
FEATURED ARTIST
Described as a “chameleon” by Carlo McCormick in the New York Times, Ganzeer operates seamlessly between art, design, and storytelling, creating what he has coined: Concept Pop. His medium of choice according to Artforum is “a little bit of everything: stencils, murals, paintings, pamphlets, comics, installations, and graphic design.”With over 40 exhibitions to his name, Ganzeer’s work has been seen in a wide variety of art galleries, impromptu spaces, alleyways, and major museums around the world, such as The Brooklyn Museum in New York, The Palace of the Arts in Cairo, Greek State Museum in Thessaloniki, the V&A in London, and the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg.Ganzeer’s current projects include a short story collection titled TIMES NEW HUMAN, and a sci-fi graphic novel titled THE SOLAR GRID, a work-in-progress that won the Society of Illustrators’ MoCCA Award of Excellence in 2023 and awarded Ganzeer the Global Thinker Award from Foreign Policy in 2016.He has been an artist-in-residence in Germany, Poland, Jordan, Holland, and Finland, and has lived extensively in Cairo, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and finally Houston—where he is now based.

For more information, check out his website: https://ganzeer.com/.

ABOUT ZFH

Zine Fest Houston (ZFH) is an annual, all-ages festival dedicated to promoting zines (self-published magazines), mini-comics, and other forms of small press, alternative, and underground DIY media and art. Admission is always free and low cost table space is made available for creators, writers, and artists involved in the creation, publication, distribution, or promotion of alternative DIY media. ZFH is the sole event in Houston that specifically provides a platform for emerging and established regional and national zine makers in the DIY community to exchange new work and create meaningful relationships that lead to productive collaboration.

Zine Fest Houston 2024  is generously funded in part by the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, Houston Arts Alliance, and The Center for Cartoon Studies.

Host or Publisher Zine Fest Houston