Michael Daniel Kennedy is a cartoonist, illustrator, designer and educator working in independent, commercial, educational, community and institutional spaces. Emerging from D.I.Y countercultures and shaped by the underground decolonisation movements of the late 2010s, his work is unified by the writing and drawing of stories to navigate culture, history, politics and lived experience.

Born and raised in Staffordshire, early on he wanted to pursue a career in comic book illustration. Whilst working as a comic book illustrator on creator-owned projects, Michael studied Visual Communication at Birmingham City University between 2013 and 2016. 

Majoring in film and animation, he discovered avant garde filmmakers and countercultural literature. In this period, Michael produced experimental and D.I.Y work in multiple mediums such as art comics, design, collage, poetry, filmmaking and animation. 

In this early period, he commenced his education practice with workshops in comics making through collage, montage and risograph printing techniques. Embracing the D.I.Y methods of his own art, this formative period established a method of working across, and challenging, traditional lines in culture and media that he has brought to the public today.

In the late 2010’s he began to expand on his D.I.Y ethos and contribute comic book informed art and illustrations to the emergent decolonisation counterculture in the U.K. He collaborated on album artwork for underground music labels and maps for Black, queer sex archives. 

In this period, Michael researched literature from the African diaspora in prose and comics, presenting his findings in reading groups. The creative response to this research was in satirical, politically engaged comic strips that provided catharsis and empathy to his online art community around the events of 2020. 

These comic strips were collected in the zine series Mint. Establishing a sustained independent practice in self publishing and distribution, the zines explored new landscapes for the comic strips as an anti-racist and creative expression.

The work in Mint developed into a practice in editorial illustration, collaborating with the likes of the New Yorker and New York Times in their journalism on the decolonisation process in politics, policy and culture.

In 2023, Michael began writing fiction about the U.K’s Caribbean diaspora. Influenced by the magical realism in underground comics from 20th century Japan, Michael produced the story collection Milk White Steed (2025, Drawn & Quarterly). A combination of classic comic genres, Caribbean folklore and literary realism, the book is nominated for the LA times book prize and was listed in The Guardians’s best graphic novels of the 2025 list. 

In 2024, Michael redefined his teaching practice, working with multiple arts institutions in the West Midlands. He has worked with families, primary, secondary and university students in workshops. Teaching skills in visual storytelling, publication design and self-publishing has been the focus of his work in education.

In the public sectors Michael collaborates with public facing organisations, helping institutions that are the intended targets of decolonisation to communicate creatively. In 2024, he embarked on an artist research fellowship with Birmingham Museum’s Trust where he mined their collections for working class histories in Birmingham’s marketplace. In 2025 Michael worked with prison charity Switchback UK on their nationwide campaign to reform probation, co-designing a two page comic strip with former offenders about their experience in probation.

Michael D. Kennedy lives in Birmingham U.K where he continues to write, draw, design and teach .