It all comes down to having lived a caterpillar life. One where, after becoming a butterfly, she becomes another caterpillar. And now a butterfly, again.
I grew up in a bloody dictatorship in an antisemitic, chauvinist, totalitarian society. The milk was brought to us in milk cans on a wagon pulled by a horse. I left Argentina barely able to speak English and with no college degree to live in the USA.
Since then, I have co-founded several million and multi-million-dollar businesses, including one that has been recognized by INC Magazine as one of the 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in the Country eight years in a row; won the Entrepreneur Woman of the Year award.
I have won dozens of international design and animation awards based on my work as Sr. Art Director for MTV, Nickelodeon, and Vh1.
I have shown my movies and animated short films at SDCC San Diego Comic Con, MOCA, Brooklyn International Children’s Film Festival, Chicago Children’s Film Festival, La Femme International Film Fest, Madrid Film Festival, and many more.
I have had my paintings shown at multiple sold-out shows at Art Basel Miami and many other great galleries, which are too many to list here. I have won an Innovation Award for the software I have designed and built to help my businesses scale for growth. And I have the first drafts of about three hundred children’s spoken word stories that I “improv’ed” in the wee hours of the morning for my son.
During the pandemic, I joined the Writing Mastery program to learn to write and used their Fast Drafting method to write my first young adult sci-fantasy novel. It was a story I had for many years that was itching to get out of my head. So I set to write a seventy-five thousand words manuscript. Little did I know I had one hundred and seventeen thousand words waiting to get out. And they all came out of me in just ten weeks which was almost harder than giving birth to my son, which required two rounds of IVF, so that’s saying a lot!
And after writing the first draft and taking on revising the novel, I started playing with making the children’s stories into comics. So that’s when this graphic novel I’m pitching you came about.
One of my dreams in life has been to introduce myself in a way that most normal people could understand: “I’m Alejandra, and I do this ONE thing.” But, I have struggled to narrow myself, my life, and the totality of my experiences to just ONE thing. Becoming a butterfly seems to be a twenty-four/seven job. So depending on whom I’m introducing myself to, I have to choose how to introduce myself. Mother, wife, woman, Latina, Jew, entrepreneur, artist, software developer, SCUBA diver, cat and dog rescuer, frog and blue crab tolerator, future astronaut, author, and illustrator.
My name is Alejandra Leibovich; nice to meet you!
