Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse is an American documentary about the cartoonist Art Spiegelman produced and directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin.
The play won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC, where it premiered in November 2024 and had a limited theatrical run on 21 February 2025.
Director: Molly Bernstein, Philip Dolin
Executive Producer: Michael Kantor, Lauren Lexton
Production: Alicia Sams, Sam Jinishian
Cinematography: Nausheen Dadabhoy, Roger Grange, Philip Dolin
Editing: Molly Bernstein
Music: Michael Leonhart
Language: English, Polish
Running time: 98 minutes
Country: United States of America
Year: 2024
Participants:
Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco, Molly Crabapple, J. Hoberman, Ken Jacobs, Najda Spiegelman, Dash Spiegelman, and others.
Synopsis extracted from the documentary's website.
"Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse" explores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the creation and revolutionary impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, the story of his parents' survival of the Holocaust and his own struggle to come to terms with this legacy.
Although best known for the two volumes of Maus (voted by the New York Public Library as one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years), Spiegelman's deeply personal work also includes In the Shadow of No Towers, Breakdowns and The Wild Party, and he is best known for his many provocative covers for The New Yorker magazine, where he worked as a cartoonist and screenwriter from 1993 to 2003. Together with his wife, Françoise Mouly, Spiegelman published and edited the acclaimed and influential comics magazine RAW between 1980 and 1991, where Maus was first published.
When Maus was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, Art, a self-professed "First Amendment fundamentalist," returned to the limelight as an ardent advocate for free speech and against book bans, both in national media appearances and in community engagements across the country. As one of our country's leading public intellectuals, he has used his platform well and continues to do so.
Disaster Is My Muse is a portrait of an artist fully engaged with his past and present who, through his chosen medium of comics, helps us understand our turbulent world, and is a testament to the power of art to make sense of our personal and collective histories.
