Kruttika Susarla is an illustrator and cartoonist from Andhra Pradesh, India, working across editorial illustration, picture books, and comics. She graduated with an MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022. Soon after, she moved to Rochester and fell in love with Mt. Hope Cemetery. She unfortunately never tried a garbage plate before moving out west in fall 2024.

Kruttika’s work for The Freedom Sisters (Pratham Books, 2024) won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators and will be part of the Illustrators 67th Annual Exhibition. She collaborates with community-engaged organizations in the US and the Global South to create books, zines, and toolkits.

Her self-published comics tell stories of connection, community, and labour. Kruttika's comics have been exhibited internationally, including at the Erlangen Comic Salon in Germany and the Fumetto Comic Festival in Switzerland. Her narrative work is bright, bold, and textural. In 2022, she won the Cartoonist Coop Minicomic award for Made in Heaven Inc. (self-published, 2021) and in 2025, she won the Paper Rocket Publishing award for Alexander’s Curse (2024), also supported by the Gallery Grant.