Alien Sketchbook by Yao Xiao

Alien Sketchbook is a zine about language, immigration, and art.

Yao Xiao is born in 1990 in Tianjin, China. She is an illustrator, cartoonist and writer residing in New York. She writes about the transient experience of being a queer immigrant in a foreign country. Her art is often about straddling and bridging different worlds and navigating difficult memories. Yao’s work blends emotion, experience, and imagination together with visual imagery. Yao Xiao started documenting her experience through a series of comics and writing after she received a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in 2013. Yao Xiao is an award-winning author, cartoonist and illustrator. She is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Ignatz Award Nominee, Define American Creative Fellow, Think!Chinatown Artist in Residence. She has spoken at The Stonewall National Museum and Archives, Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles, The Society of Illustrators, and Columbia University, and shown work at fine art galleries in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle; her first solo show opened in 2020 in New York City's Chinatown. Yao Xiao currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City where she lives and creates.