Join the next Film Club featuring George Butler, award-winning illustrator and journalist whose work from Syria and Ukraine is held in the V&A Museum’s National Archive. Butler’s art offers an intimate view into life amid war, capturing the vulnerability and resilience of those living through conflict.
Building on the documentary Inside Syria (available on YouTube), this session invites reflection on how visual art and storytelling help us understand war, displacement, and everyday life under crisis. Butler will reflect on the social and political landscape of Syria today, share insights from his on-the-ground reporting in Syria, his process of sketching in conflict zones, and the power of visual storytelling.
This free, online event is open to all and especially designed for K–12 educators seeking resources and perspectives for teaching about global conflicts, migration, refugees, and the human experience behind the headlines. Viewing the film in advance is recommended but not required.
Illustrator George Butler reports on the ground from conflict zones, climate hotspots and humanitarian crises. He uses pen, ink and watercolours to highlight personal stories of resilience – by slowing down and going deeper than the headlines. His humanistic approach is shifting how we think about the news.
In August 2012 George walked from Turkey across the border into Syria, where as a guest of the rebel Free Syrian Army, he drew the civil war-damaged, small and empty town of Azaz. A decade later he spent several days in the Metro in Kharkiv, Ukraine recording the lives of those that lived underground to avoid the Russian bombardment. These drawings can be seen in the National Archive at V&A Museum. (London).
Over the last 15 years George has been commissioned to offer a deliberately slow alternative to the headlines. He attaches his drawings to the personal testimonies of those that he meets and records their resolve and resilience alongside the vulnerability of their situations. This has included in a Leprosy Clinic in Nepal, a militia in Yemen, the Mass Graves in Bucha, a caesarean-section in Afghanistan, the artisanal oil fields of Myanmar and most recently for the Guardian documenting the aftermath of the Earthquake in Turkey and Syria. (22/2/23)
“In Ukraine I learnt that the stories of those I was trying to draw, were in fact, far more significant than my attempts at figurative likeness on the page. The drawings became an introduction to something and someone more meaningful that we would have otherwise never known”.
He has written and published two books, one disbanding the myths of migration Drawn Across Borders and the most recent recording first hand testimonies alongside drawings in Ukraine. Published in UK, USA, Japan and China.
He has collaborated with Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo on two books War Horse and When Fishes Flew.
He is a TED Fellow and TEDX speaker, and has lectured this year at Brown College, Georgetown University, Davidson College, Chicago School of Art, Edinburgh and Cambridge art collages.
His work from Syria and Ukraine are held in V&A Museum in London as part of the National Archive. He was commissioned by the National Army Museum to document the British Army’s response to Covid.
His drawings and diary for VQR magazine won Best Illustrated story at the ASME Awards in the USA in 2023. In 2014 he won the V&A Illustration Award and the Breakaway Award at the International Media Awards presented by Don McCullin. And in 2023 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Kate Greenaway Award.
George is a founder of Action Syria, a NGO he started in 2014 in the UK to support doctors and teacher salaries in Syria, this work later grew to cover Turkey and now Lebanon. To date Action Syria has raised over 9 million. In 2022 George was the official artist of the CoExistence campaign which raised £2million GBP for conservation projects in Asia.
He is one of the long standing story tellers for The Wilderness Project. Which surveys biodiversity down some of Africa’s most unexplored rivers.
This event is sponsored by IRIS NRC and the Middle East Studies Program at UW-Madison.
