Nadia Perrotta is an Italian-born artist, author and educator based in Kent. Her practice moves across comics, visual storytelling, music, performance, moving image and socially engaged art. With a background in video art and experimental documentary, her work explores memory, identity, belonging and transformation through symbolic and narrative forms.
Nadia is the creator of Murphy’s Adventures, an independent graphic novel series with an original soundtrack and performance elements developed as part of its creative identity from the beginning. Inspired by 1990s anime aesthetics, emotional colour and personal memory, the series follows Murphy through strange worlds, fractured memories and shifting realities as she searches for identity, belonging and a way forward.
The project is connected to Nadia’s work with young people and the creative practice that later developed through House of Stars. Through comics, characters, music and storytelling, Murphy’s Adventures creates space for exploring imagination, emotion and lived experience.
Presentation: Murphy’s Adventures: Conversations from the Worlds We Build
For KArtsCon2026, Nadia returns with Murphy’s Adventures in response to the theme Art: Starting a Conversation.
This presentation brings Murphy directly into the room as a live narrative presence. Through storytelling, dialogue and music, the session unfolds as a conversation between character, artist and audience.
Rather than explaining the work from a distance, Murphy’s Adventures is experienced from within. The audience is invited into the world of Murphy as she shares fragments of her journey: getting lost, searching for meaning, encountering unfamiliar worlds, and navigating questions of identity, memory and change.
The presentation explores how fantasy, comics and music can open conversations around real experiences, including isolation, belonging, growing up, adaptation, and the tension between past and future. Symbolic elements within the story — shifting landscapes, fragmented memories and constructed worlds — become ways of approaching complex realities through narrative and performance.
As the session develops, the boundary between story and audience becomes fluid. Those who are familiar with Murphy’s world are able to engage with it directly, while others encounter it for the first time through dialogue and shared experience.
Murphy’s Adventures asks what happens when a character is no longer only read on the page, but begins to speak — and what conversations can emerge when a fictional world meets a real audience.
