Rita Fürstenau is an illustrator, author and publisher of the award-winning Rotopol publishing house for graphic storytelling. Since co-founding the company in 2007, she has published high quality books by exciting talents with personal drawing and storytelling styles. Rita Fürstenau was born in Berlin in 1982 and moved to Kassel in 2001 to study. Here she studied visual communication with a focus on illustration at the School of Arts and Design and primary school teaching and educational science at the University of Kassel. In 2006, while still a student, she founded the "Verlag ohne Titel", which later became Rotopol. In addition to her work as an artist and publisher, she occasionally works in children's and youth education and teaches illustration and graphic storytelling as a guest lecturer at various universities, including the Kunsthochschule Kassel, The Animation Workshop Viborg (DK), the University of Sofia (BG) and Fudan University in Shanghai (CN). Her illustration clients include Bahlsen, Google, Goldkinder-Magazin and the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel. Her own work is published by Rotopol in the form of books, folded booklets and printed paper products, and can be found in her bookshop in Kassel, along with the rest of the publishing programme and a large number of comics and picture books from all over the world.