Joel Alessandra

Joël Alessandra was born in Marseille in 1967. He graduated from the École Boulle with a degree in interior design. He published his first stories in Italy in the famous magazine Il Grifo. He spent time in Africa on several occasions, notably in Djibouti, where he worked with the French Cultural Center; this experience inspired his first graphic novel, Fikrie (published by La Boîte à Bulles, 2006). As a scriptwriter, comic artist and illustrator of travel journals, he has drawn on his travels around the world for over 30 years to fuel his book projects and presentations at French Institutes and Alliances Françaises, as well as in refugee camps. Errance en mer Rouge (Wandering in the Red Sea), published in 2014, won the award for Best Comic Book at the 13th Nîmes Comic Art Festival. In 2020, he published Les voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Dupuis, 2020). Coffee is his tool of the trade; he needs two liters a day to fuel both himself and his brush. He also contributes to numerous collaborative graphic novels published by Petit à Petit, works as an advertising and media illustrator, and creates documentaries (for magazines such as Bouts du Monde and XXI…) and web documentaries that combine comic art and journalism (notably Little Burma—a web documentary on Burma—on Le Monde.fr). In 2022, he published On la trouvait plutôt jolie, an adaptation of a novel by Michel Bussi, published by Michel Lafon. He currently lives in Arpaillargues, in the Gard department. In 2023, he teamed up with Théa Rojzman for a new comic book published by Daniel Maghen, Le Voyageur, followed in 2025 by Je est un autre.