The Building Permit

Hannah Sarvasy grew up in Berkeley, drawing and playing violoncello at Walden, a school founded in 1958 by anarchists. At Harvard she earned the 2003 David McCord Prize for artistic contribution, and for her honors thesis she recorded folktales in the High Atlas Mountains. A 2004–2005 Fulbright scholar, she studied Afro-Asiatic languages and currently works with Tucker Childs documenting dying languages in Sierra Leone. There Sarvasy created graphic narratives in the near-extinct language Kim. In 2006 she debuted her graphic novella Dear Brother. When not in the field, Sarvasy lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.