|  Hannah Sarvasy was born in 1982. She grew up reading, drawing, writing, and playing violoncello at Walden School, a teachers' cooperative in Berkeley founded by anarchists in 1958. Walden's emphasis on the arts and personal expression was important in her development. She went on to attend urban public schools, perform in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and work on mural crews, before entering Harvard University, where she concentrated in Folklore with a Linguistics special field.
At Harvard, she drew a weekly editorial cartoon for The Harvard Crimson, won both Harvard University Telephone Directory cover artwork contests, received mural and painting commissions, illustrated numerous campus publications, and received the 2003 David McCord Prize for artistic contribution to the Harvard and Leverett House communities. She recorded folk tales in a Tashelhit-speaking village in the High Atlas Mountains for her Harvard honors thesis. As a 2004-05 Fulbright Scholar at Leiden University, The Netherlands, she continued translating these folktales and studied other languages in the Afro-Asiatic language phylum.
In June 2006, Hannah Sarvasy debuted her graphic
novella Dear Brother at the biannual
Stripdagen comics festival in Haarlem, the
Netherlands. Since then, her illustrations have
appeared in the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, a weekly journal similar to Vanity Fair
and Harper's. Her six-page graphic
story "Een Avond in de Mozartlaan" ("An Evening on
Mozart Lane") ran in the January 20, 2007 issue of the
Vrij Nederland.
She is a member of the National Puzzlers' League and is working on endangered language documentation in Sierra Leone.
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