Diana Raznovich

Diana Raznovich (born 1945) is an Argentine playwright and cartoonist. Her work in both mediums is comedic in tone and deals with feminism, sexuality, and Argentina's military dictatorship.

Early life and education Diana Raznovich was born in Buenos Aires in 1945, the oldest of three children. Her grandparents were European Jewish immigrants to the country from the Russian Empire and Vienna.

She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where she was chosen as one of the students who would read to professor Jorge Luis Borges, who had gone blind by that time.

Career

Theater Raznovich's first play, Buscapiés, won a theater contest in 1967, jumpstarting her career when she was only 22 years old.

Raznovich self-exiled the following year amid threats from the armed forces. She settled in Spain, where she taught playwriting at the Centro de Estudios Teatrales in Madrid and continued to write her own plays. In 2002, she published a bilingual collection of four of her plays, titled Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes.

Cartoons Raznovich is also a cartoonist. Her early humorous illustrations were tied to her involvement in the Argentine feminist movement, as she contributed cartoons to the women's and LGBT rights-centered magazine Alfonsina in the 1980s. Her cartooning is based in the concept that women's humor is inherently political, as explained in her "Manifesto 2000 of Feminine Humor,"

In 2022, her work was the subject of a censorship campaign by a group of Spanish judges who took offense at her depiction of a judge's flippant reaction to spousal abuse, leading to the piece's removal from an exhibit on the Balearic Islands. The artist condemned her critics for their "disproportionate" reaction and asked for her cartoon to be reinstated in the exhibit.

Other work Raznovich has also written poetry and novels, including Para que se cumplan todos tus deseos in 1989, though she primarily works in plays. She also worked as a screenwriter for the telenovela Bárbara Narváez in the 1980s.

Raznovich is bisexual, and much of her work deals with gender and sexuality. Some of her work is also informed by her Jewish heritage, and she has studied Kabbalah as an adult.