Ulli Lust

Ulli Lust, born in 1967 in Vienna, is an Austrian comic artist and author. She studied graphic design at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art.

Lust made a name for herself as a creator of documentary comics. She began drawing reportage-based works, such as Fashionvictims, Trendverächter (2008), based on journalistic research. Berlin-Helmholtzplatz 1998 + 2004 (2004) is a long-term study of a square in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, whose changes she experienced after moving there in 1997. Lust also created comics that blend eroticism and mythology, such as Airpussy (2005), which tells the story of a prehistoric fertility rite in “Springpoems.”

Ulli Lust worked for five years on her autobiographical comic epic Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2009). In her youth, she tried to integrate into the punk scene in Vienna, and in this book, she tells the story of two underage Viennese punk girls who run away to Italy without any money. The book marked Lust’s professional breakthrough and earned her numerous awards: the 2010 ICOM Prize for Best German Comic Publication, the Max and Moritz Audience Award at the Erlangen Comic Salon 2010, the Artémisia Prize 2011, and the Prix Révélation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2011. It was translated into many European languages and was also a great success in its U.S. edition.

With How I Tried to Be a Good Person (2017), Lust continued her autobiographical approach, telling a sensual and powerful story from her time as a young artist in 1990s Vienna. The protagonist is in an open relationship with two men, both of whom know about each other. One is Georg, an actor twenty years her senior, and the other is Kimata, a Nigerian bon vivant whom she marries to secure his residence permit. What begins as a peaceful utopia gradually turns into a drama of possession and violence and ends in an act of self-liberation.

Ulli Lust draws a monthly comic strip for the English-language magazine ExBerliner. She is a professor of illustration and comics at the University of Applied Sciences in Hanover and has been running the online comic publisher electrocomics.de since 2005.

Her latest book, The Woman as Human, was published in 2025. It explores the beginnings of art and the importance of empathy for the survival of our species. Centered around archaic female figures, a forgotten world unfolds, where the hero’s journey was a collective experience — one completed only together, by women, men, children, or non-binary individuals, often in richly adorned roles.

Lust lives in Berlin.