Drawn Together: Comics, Food, & Collective Care

November 12-13, 2025

Presented by the BU Office for the Arts in collaboration with the BU Visual Narrative and BU Gastronomy programs, this two-day residency explores the intersections of food, comics, cultural storytelling, and community care. Featuring guest artists Mariah-Rose Marie and Shaina Lu, both illustrators and authors whose work centers food, heritage, and resistance. This residency invites the BU community to engage through interactive workshops, a cooking demonstration, class visits, and an artist panel.

The themes reflect how everyday practices like cooking and storytelling can become powerful tools for cultural preservation. Through visual narratives and shared meals, the residency highlights how artists and communities alike can use creative expression to resist erasure, and nourish both individual and collective well-being. For BU’s diverse and international student population, these themes resonate deeply, acknowledging the many ways culture is carried, shared, and defended across borders, generations, and kitchen tables.

Events

Afro-Indo-American: Cooking Kunde from Scratch
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 1:00-2:30 PM
Demonstration Room 124, 808 Commonwealth Ave.

A cooking demonstration for Kunde with artist in residence, Mariah-Rose Marie. Mariah-Rose will talk about their deep dive of black eyed peas while demonstrating the process of making Kunde. Attendees will get to taste the dish afterwards. Registration link coming soon.

Recipes for Resistance Zine Workshop w/ Mariah-Rose Marie
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 5:00-7:00 PM
HTC Commons (Room 205), 808 Commonwealth Ave.

Come combine the power of both with Mariah-Rose Marie, the author and artist behind COOK LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS, where we’ll draw, collage, and write our way through the process of turning a recipe into a recording of your world as it is now. You’ll leave with a mini zine for you to reproduce, trade, and share as you wish, no algorithm or government approval required. All materials provided. Just bring a recipe* you’d like to remember. Register HERE

Hot-Pot-Luck Collage Workshop with Shaina Lu
Thursday, November 13, 2025 | 1:00-3:00 PM
HTC Commons (Room 205), 808 Commonwealth Ave.

In an increasingly isolated and detached world, community meals provide a space for joy and connection. Hotpot, an age-long eating tradition that originated in China, is the ultimate communal meal, where diners cook their own raw vegetables, sliced meats, and other ingredients in a boiling shared pot. We’re combining hotpots and potlucks – using art supplies, come make your own mini collage hotpot, or contribute an ingredient (or several) to a large communal hotpot. Register HERE

Drawn Together Artist Panel with Mariah-Rose, Shaina Lu, and Joel Gill
Thursday, November 13, 2025 | 5:30-7:00 PM
HTC Commons (Room 205), 808 Commonwealth Ave.

Join Mariah-Rose Marie, Shaina Lu, and Joel Gill in the conversation as we discuss the theme of the residency, Drawn Together: Comics, Food, and Collective Care. There will be a celebratory closing reception where our Artists-in-Residence will join us. Registration link coming soon.

Artist bio

Mariah-Rose Marie is a graphic novelist, story artist, educator, and writer based in Tovaangar, aka Los Ángeles. Their comic, illustration, and storyboard work can be seen anywhere from Netflix and HBO Max to The New Yorker, Science for the People Magazine, EATER, and the multi-award winning graphic journalism magazine, The Nib. Always with empathy (and often with humor) Mariah-Rose interweaves the individual and the global through stories that reach across political borders and personal identity. 

Mariah-Rose is the maker of COOK LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS: An Illustrated Guide to Intuitive Cooking with Recipes from Around the World (Silver Sprocket, 2023), A Quick & Easy Guide to Healthy Relationships (Oni Press, 2025), and their debut fiction graphic novel GO BACK & GET IT (Make Me A World / Random House Children’s) is coming in 2028. 

Shaina Lu 呂明穎 (she/her) is a queer Taiwanese-American artist interested in the intersection of art, education, and activism. 

She creates community art for social change through dialogue and conversation with local youth, residents, and grassroots organizers. You can see her public art throughout Boston’s Chinatown, MA, where she works, and in Malden, MA, where she lives. In 2023, the Massachusetts AAPI Commission honored Shaina as an Unsung Hero for her work as an artist and organizer.

Shaina has worked in the education field since 2012, both as a public school teacher and as a program director in a community-based organization. As an educator, Shaina develops project-based learning experiences for young artists to draw knowledge and inspiration from their communities and to use art as a tool to effect social change. She currently works with young artists and makers in Boston’s Chinatown.

Shaina also writes and illustrates for a more just and liberated world. She is the author and illustrator of NOODLE & BAO (2024, HarperCollins Quill Tree), a middle grade graphic novel about food, family, and fighting against gentrification. She is currently working on two upcoming picture books with Penguin Kokila and one more forthcoming graphic novel with HarperCollins Quill Tree.
Shaina is a proud alumna of Wellesley College, and she holds a Masters in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Most importantly, she drinks juice every day, and she is full of sugar.

Upcoming Artist Residencies

Past Artist Residencies

The following residencies have been produced since the founding of the BU Office for the Arts in 2012!

Other visiting artists sponsored by BU Arts Initiative:

The Crossroads Project, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Maya Lin, Sonia Sanchez, Stephen Schwartz, Deborah Lipstadt, Gerald Vizenor, Alysia Harris, Stacey Tyrell, and Martha Graham Cracker.