Dave Ortega

Publishers Weekly praised it as "deeply personal and affecting." Ortega's work appears in several comics anthologies, and is in the permanent collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. In 2016, he created a life-size interactive installation for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and in 2025, Ortega was named a Brother Thomas Fellow of The Boston Foundation.

• Name — Dave Ortega • Birthplace — El Paso, Texas, U.S. • Nationality — American • Area — Comics artist • Collaborators — The Miracle 5 • Notable Works — * Abuela y Los Dead Mexicans (2011) • Hacienda (2013) • Días de Consuelo (2015–2020; 2021) • Awards — * The Best American Comics notable comic (2012) • Comics Workbook Composition Competition winner (2013) • Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts grant (2021) • Brother Thomas Fellow (2025) • Website — daveortegadraws.com

Ortega grew up in El Paso, Texas, where he played video games as a child. He was not introduced to comics until he attended the University of Texas at El Paso.

Ortega read his first graphic novel, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, after college. Ortega studied how Miller and Art Spiegelman used panel composition in their storytelling. Ortega moved to Boston in 2000 to pursue art and illustration. He became part of Somerville's independent comics community and has exhibited with the collaborative group The Miracle 5. He has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Brandeis University. In 2024, he was a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Illustration — Cover of Días de Consuelo No. 1 (2015) In fall 2015, Ortega self-published the first issue of Días de Consuelo, chronicling the life of his grandmother Consuelo Castañón Herrera, who was born in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution. The work incorporates historical figures including Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and President Venustiano Carranza, showing how the revolution affected daily life while focusing on women's experiences rather than battlefield action. Ortega crafted the story from family lore and historical sources. The six-issue series concluded in 2020. The complete work was published as a graphic novel in 2021.

Ortega regularly exhibits at comics and art book fairs throughout North America, including the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, the Latino Comics Expo, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) and Mini-MICE, the NY Art Book Fair, the Small Press Expo, and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. In addition to his comics, Ortega creates wearable art. He participated in a collaborative silk-screening project at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and exhibited in the group show "Beyond the Fluff & Fold: Contemporary Artists & the T-Shirt" at The Art Institute of Boston, displaying work from his "Tees from the Future" series featuring characters from his comics. He has also created immersive experiences, including the interactive installation Comics: Frame by Frame at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which featured movable black-and-white panels that visitors could rearrange to create narratives, with paper speech bubbles available to add dialogue. Ortega appeared at the museum to collaborate with visitors. The installation addressed how people construct narratives from fragmented information, a problem Ortega had faced when documenting his grandmother's story.