Gianluca Costantini: The Italian cartoonist whose powerful art has chronicled two decades of global human rights struggles

In his studio in Ravenna, a small art city in central Italy, cartoonist and artist Gianluca Costantini sits calmly by a large, white desk. His busy creative space is evident: pens, coloured pastels, books, magazines, and an iPad are spread across his desk.

To some, Gianluca is a militant cartoonist; to others, a staunch defender of freedom and justice. He is a prolific artist whose work spans cartoons, comics journalism, and activism — not necessarily in that order. Alongside this, he is a professor of comic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.

Just months earlier, Gianluca reached a major milestone in his career in nearby Bologna. A historic building, Palazzo d’Accursio, hosted Cessate il Fuoco 2005-2025: Vent'anni di battaglie per i diritti umani (Ceasefire 2005-2025: Twenty Years of Battles for Human Rights). This solo exhibition celebrated two decades of Gianluca’s art focused on human rights.

Born in Ravenna in 1971, Gianluca, the only child of a modest family, was raised in a region historically known as a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party.

After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, his career gained momentum in 1993, when he began collaborating with newspapers, including the Italian left-wing daily Il Manifesto, which published his editorial illustrations.

Strengthened awareness

Gianluca’s engagement with political and social causes strengthened after a trip to post-war Sarajevo in 2001. There, he participated in the X Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean as part of the artist collective Inguine.net, focusing on graphic arts.

Unlike traditional satirical caricatures, Gianluca’s political cartoons are not meant to amuse. Instead, they depict individuals denied a humane existence — those imprisoned, tortured, or killed for standing up for justice.

According to Gianluca, his concise and intense drawing style originates "from a study of calligraphy," and his subjects include figures such as American philosopher and politician Cornel West, Saudi cartoonist Mohammed al-Ghamdi, and human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi.

Speaking about his work in more detail, Gianluca says his cartoons have appeared in a wide range of national and international publications, including his popular X account, known as ChannelDraw.

He has documented key moments of protest and revolution, including the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in Cairo, the Occupy Gezi protests in Istanbul in 2013, and the Iranian demonstrations following the killing of Mahsa Amini.

His art also supports humanitarian campaigns. Gianluca creates drawings for organisations such as Action Aid, Amnesty International, and SOS Mediterranee. These images feature prominently in protests, conferences, and public art installations. In 2019, Amnesty International (Italy) awarded him the Art and Human Rights award.

Currently, Gianluca is engaged in a project with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based organisation advocating for press freedom worldwide.

“I am creating a series of portraits based on original photographic images of over 160 journalists who died following the 7 October war in Gaza,” he says.

Prolific contributions to graphic literature

As a prolific artist, Gianluca has also curated and illustrated various publications, including graphic novels created in collaboration with Italian journalists, as well as short stories and memoirs.

Among his notable works is Libia (Libya), published in Italian by Mondadori in 2019, based on a story by award-winning journalist Francesca Mannocchi.

He also illustrated Eric Meyer’s graphic novel Xi Jinping, l'empereur du silence, published in French by Delcourt Editions in 2024. This book won the prestigious Grand Prix Asia award.

Additionally, Gianluca authored San Michele Cemetery Island (Damocle Editore, 2022), a booklet featuring landscapes and portraits of Venice’s famous cemetery.

For his latest work, Gianluca, a father of one, has resumed collaborating with his wife, Elettra Stamboulis, an Italian-born curator and daughter of a Greek exile. Their previous joint project was the 2015 book, Diario segreto di Pasolini (Pasolini’s Secret Diary).

More recently, they teamed up with dissident artist Ai Weiwei on his memoir Zodiac (Ten Speed Graphic, 2024; Italian edition by Oblomov Edizioni), a rare graphic memoir by a world-renowned figure.

“I started collaborating with Elettra in the early 2000s,” Gianluca recalls.

He adds, “When we organised an exhibition of works by Joe Sacco in Ravenna. At the time, Joe was virtually unknown in Italy. Following that success, we curated an exhibition of works by Marjane Satrapi in 2003, one of the few to display her original artworks.”

This professional partnership later culminated in the Komikazen Festival, an event devoted to comics based on real life, Gianluca explains.

Held annually in Ravenna from 2005 to 2016, the festival was organised through Mirada (from the Spanish for 'sight'), a cultural association founded by Elettra and friends, which Gianluca later joined.

Notable members included Algerian writer Tahar Lamri, who remains a friend of Gianluca’s despite the association no longer being active.

Exhibitions and artistic installations

Gianluca's notable achievements also include exhibitions of his drawings in galleries and museums across London, Paris, and Italy.

In a recent installation titled Ci sono amori senza paradiso (There Are Loves Without Paradise), he portrayed victims of femicide.

Commissioned in 2024 by the Vicino/Lontano Premio Terzani festival in Udine, the exhibit was displayed for several weeks in Piazza JF Kennedy in Ravenna. Each portrait was accompanied only by the victim’s name and the manner of her death, set in a symbolic place of memory.

In his own words, his website, ChannelDraw, serves as a valuable archive for those wishing to explore his work from the beginning.

“In the section Decoration of Existence, I have preserved my early illustrations from the 1990s, which reflect a more oneiric and underground style,” Gianluca explains.

Drawn in black ink on white paper, these stories of anti-heroes are now also being produced by Gianluca as a self-published, full-colour annual book, starting in 2025.

“Today, I usually draw for the web using an iPad,” he says. “I post my drawings in English, even though I don’t know the language because I suffer from dyslexia, which makes it impossible for me to learn it.”

Facing censorship and controversy

While Gianluca says he is rarely attacked today for his drawings, he has faced hostility in the past. Following the failed coup in Turkey in July 2016, his ChannelDraw Twitter account was censored by the Turkish government.

On 28 July, he was tried in absentia at the criminal court in Golbasi (Ankara), accused of terrorism for a drawing.

“I was regularly visiting Istanbul and even collaborated with the satirical magazine LeMan,” he recalls.

In 2018, Gianluca lost his job as a sports illustrator at CNN following an accusation of anti-Semitism related to a cartoon published on Twitter in 2015 featuring Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He regarded the accusation as an instrumental attack by the American populist far-right. Publicising the incident sparked debate in Italy around satirical cartoons, accusations of anti-Semitism, and the limits of freedom of expression.

[Cover photo: Gianluca photographed by Michele Lapini]

Elisa Pierandrei is an Italian journalist and author based in Milan. She writes and researches stories across art, literature, and the visual media. Elisa holds a master's degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the American University in Cairo (2002), after graduating in Arabic Language and Literature at Ca' Foscari University in Venice (1998)

Follow her on X: @ShotOfWhisky