Jennifer Joy Burgdorff has been awarded the Faculty Prize in the Master’s programme in Design
Third Culture Kids grow up straddling two worlds: they spend much of their childhood or adolescence far from their parents’ home culture. They experience foreign countries, grow to love them, and then have to leave them behind. These unique experiences shape them, yet behind the adventure lie invisible wounds: the loss caused by goodbyes, and grief that nobody sees. Jennifer Joy Burgdorff’s graphic novel brings these to light.
“Using the Chaikhona Rohat teahouse in Dushanbe as an example, the author autobiographically processes her own and her family’s experiences of migration, combining these with insights from literature and interviews with her sisters,” explains Prof. Franziska Junge, who supervised the project alongside the Hamburg-based comic artist Eva Müller. “In her book, Jennifer Joy Burgdorff combines research, self-reflection and innovative storytelling. The in-depth research on the subject is expressed through a personal narrative style that speaks for everyone who has experienced a similar loss. The layout of both the panels and the pages is always driven by the content: design is never used merely for its own sake, but the visual composition consistently follows the narrative impulse and aligns with the content.”
