Ngozi Ukazu

Ngozi Ukazu is a New York Times-bestselling cartoonist and the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, born and raised in Houston, Texas. She attended Bellaire High School where she served as comics editor for the school newspaper, then graduated from Yale University with a degree in Computing and the Arts before earning an MFA in Sequential Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2015. She later received an honorary MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies. She is the creator of Check, Please! — a queer hockey romance webcomic launched in 2013 that became the most funded webcomics Kickstarter in history, with the Year One campaign raising $74,290 in 2015 and subsequent campaigns for Year Two and Year Three each raising over $300,000. The series was published in print by First Second Books and won the Reuben Award and the William Morris Award. Check, Please! has been translated into multiple languages and optioned for TV adaptation (announced December 2025). For DC Comics she wrote and illustrated the young adult graphic novel Barda (2023), based on Big Barda, and Orion (Summer 2026), following the Fourth World hero. She also co-created Bunt! with artist Mad Rupert — a graphic novel about a student on financial aid — and her most recent graphic novel Flip was published in 2025. Her cartoons regularly appear in The New Yorker. She has taught digital coloring at the Center for Cartoon Studies and served as a SCAD Sequential Arts Mentor. She was the Commencement Speaker for the Center for Cartoon Studies Class of 2024.