Little Minotaur: Walker Books

Since an early age Gaia Alessi has enjoyed building worlds and making new imaginary friends, be they drawn or constructed. After studying Architecture in Italy, she studied Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, the going on to complete an MA in Fine Art at the same college. She worked as an artist for over a decade, building publicly accessible environments and producing soundscapes and videos for events and television programmes. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums all around the world.

Drawing inspiration from films, folklore, pop culture, French Impressionism and videogames as well as her lively immediate neighbourhood and colourful extended family, she always works with story and character in mind varying the amount of stylisation she uses to suit a project or age range. She strives for her drawings to offer people an unexpected outlook on the world. She views pictures as bridges to new worlds and loves experimenting with digital and traditional media, including gouache, coloured pencils, ink and cut paper.

Gaia loves all things mythical and mysterious, like ghosts, yokai, kaiju, elementals, exoworlds and any creature whose name ends in '-aur' imaginary or not. She is fond of each-and-every-animal, any natural environment from this planet (especially mountains and forests!) and anything cute, fluffy, squishy and kawaii from any planet at all.

Gaia lives in London with her husband, her daughter and a menagerie of furry friends.