Currently I am a postdoc – wow, a full time job! As a freelance educator I was teaching courses and workshops in English and in Hungarian on the following subjects:
- comics: making comics, histories of comics, comics studies
- environmental humanities and arts
- critical thinking, ethics, art
- visual culture studies
- theory
- 20st and 21st century literature
- academic writing
Please find some course concepts and syllabi below. References are available from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (departments: Theory, Animation, and Graphic Design) and Milestone Institute, Budapest.
“Always thinking one step ahead of me and, in a way, surprising me with certain questions or assignments which are a bit challenging and test my knowledge in the fields that I am interested in.”
Feedback by teenage student at Milestone Institute.
Courses
Picture This! Milestone Institute, Budapest
2024, 2023, 2022
The course complicates secondary school students’ understanding of images and how visual communication works. The course helps students to familiarize themselves with theoretical frameworks of art criticism and visual culture studies. Students are required to read theoretical texts, collect images and reflect on them in our discussion forum week by week.
By the end of the course, students are familiar with topics such as images and ideology, images and power, gendered gazes, countervisuality, colonial and decolonial gazes, and images as witnessing practices. As a final product, students create a zine on a chosen topic.
The course is taught in English.
Image: Final zine by Borbála Sárai, 2022.
Create, Curate, Coordinate / Advanced Design Projects Milestone Institute, Budapest, 2025, 2023
Participants, who are high shcool students considering university courses in various creative fields, plan, design, and implement a creative project commenting on the human–nature relationship of their choice. The module enhances creative thinking and problem solving skills, invites students to be curious and take risks. It also provides opportunities to practise time management, organising work, keeping deadlines, and improve presentation skills. Students gain experience in generating ideas by creative practice and in critically reflecting on a social issue in art. They practise writing about their artistic/design work and will learn to plan a project. They learn to give and receive constructive feedback.
The course is taught in English.
Image: Student project on artificial frass by Hanna Bíró, 2023.
Storytelling with Comics (MA course)
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest
Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Practice-based comics course with weekly assignmetns and readings. Aims:
- Experiencing comics as a way of thinking, as a process of design, and as a practice of storytelling
- Experimenting with multimodal storytelling in comics, that is, using words and images to tell a story
- Experiencing the creative challenges of comics making: script, motivation, dialog, visual rhythm, layout, materiality
- Making our own comics
- Verbalizing and reflecting on how a story is structured and told in comics
The course is taught in English.
Image: Back and front covers of a collection of comics made during this course in Fall 2022.
For me, teaching is…
- Dialogue
- Exploration
- Energy
- Listening
- Creativity
- Journey
- Questions
- New Questions
Humans and Animals
Institute for Theoretical Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest
2025, 2024, 2022
After a brief intor into the development of the relationship between humans and animals in European culture, the course deals with contemporary questions stemming from the realization that humans have irrevocably changed nature, and need to develop new kinds of relationships to it. We read theoretical texts and comics, we look for examples of art and talk a lot. A goal of the course is looking for connections between our theoretical readings and works of art and design. Another goal is to enrich the concepts widely used today (e.g. Anthropocene, decolonialism, Capitalocene, ecocriticism, posthumanism, multispecies justice) with clearer and more critical interpretations. 2022 Syllabus in Hungarian. 2025 Syllabus in English [Image: Tyger King, Netflix]
Thinking Comics, Making Comics
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest
Spring 2022
Fall 2022
This is a redesigned version of my Thinking, Story, Design course in Autumn 2021. Our focus is on making comics in a playful way, linking drawing and design to a way of thinking, reading comics week by week, building a critical vocabulary that helps students reflect on their own work and analyze other’s comics. By the end of the course, students have experimented with various forms and constraints in their weekly comics making practices, have designed their own comics project on a building of their choice, have given regular constructive feedback to others, have received regular constructive feedback, and have completed their 4-page comic. The course is attended by students of animation, media design, and design theory. Syllabus Spring 2022 in Hungarian. [Image by Tom Houghomat.]
What Are You Looking At?
Milestone Institute, Budapest
Spring 2022
The aim of this course is to complicate our understanding of and relationship to art and works of art. The course helps students to familiarize themselves with theoretical frameworks of art criticism and visual culture studies. Students learn about and try out several approaches of discussing images. Though the course has a focus on Western painting, we will also consider images in other media, and images that are not art. Students read texts and watch videos by leading contemporary art historians and thinkers. Each class is organized around a different question, students are required to collect images and reflect on them for each and every class. Syllabus in English. [Image: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn]
The course is taught in English.
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Art and Ethics after 1960
Institute for Theoretical Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest
We discuss ethical questions raised in the second part of the 20th century and in the 21st century with the help of artistic products in diverse media (film, painting, installation, photography). Our topics include the banality of evil, Milgram’s experiments, Doris Salcedo’s art, public art, environmental ethics, comics journalism, photographing illness, and the work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction (following W.J.T. Mitchell). Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image: Cliff Joseph: My Country Right or Wrong]
Comics and Storytelling one-week workshop
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest
An intensive practical workshop for students of animation. The course is designed to support students in their animation project about “the meaning of life,” which is an overarching theme for the term. We do creative exercises that help students experiment with the specific characteristics of the medium of comics, our focus is on designing time and space of the page. Students also do creative writing exercises to explore the characters they will work with in their “the meaning of life” projects and make experimental comics about them. We also read short comics (excerpts from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Majen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry, and two zines by Kerbaj, Cloud and Cola.) Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image: comics by the students]
Chapters from the History of Comics – lecture
Department of Visual Communication, Budapest Metropolitan University
Lecture series about the history of comics, topics include production and gender in the 19th century (on the example of recently redeiscovered Marie Duval), the birth of the comic book and WW2, comics and the fear of losing children’s innocence, the graphic novel, comics in Hungary, digital contexts. [Image: The Happy Hooligan by F. B. Opper.]
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