is an illustrator, author and publisher of the award-winning publishing house Rotopol for graphic storytelling. Since co-founding the publishing house in 2007, she has published high-quality books by exciting talents with personal drawing and storytelling styles. Rita Fürstenau was born in Berlin in 1982 and moved to Kassel in 2001 for her studies. Here she studied visual communication with a focus on illustration at the School of Arts and Design and primary school teaching and educational science at the University of Kassel. In 2006, while she was still studying, she founded the “Verlag ohne Titel” which then became the Rotopol publishing house. In addition to her artistic and publishing work, she occasionally works in children’s and youth education and teaches as a guest lecturer in the areas of illustration and graphic storytelling at various universities, including the Kassel Art University, The Animation Workshop Viborg (DK), the University of Sofia (BG) and Fudan University in Shanghai (CN). Her clients as an illustrator include Bahlsen, Google, Goldkinder-Magazin and the Hessen Kassel Museum Landscape. Her own work is published by Rotopol in the form of books, folded booklets and printed paper goods and can be found together with the rest of the publishing program and a large number of comic and picture books from all over the world in her bookstore in Kassel.

Website: rita-fuerstenau.de
Instagram: instagram.com/rita_fuerstenau/