Powerpaola (real name: Paola Andrea Gaviria Silguero) was born in Quito (Ecuador) in 1977 and moved to Colombia with her family when she was 13 years old. She studied at the Fundación Universitaria de Bellas Artes in Medellín, where she founded the art collective Taller 7. After extended stays in Paris, Sydney, San Salvador and elsewhere, she currently lives in Buenos Aires. At the age of 27, she began drawing comics, which first appeared on Flickr; then, in 2011, Argentine publisher Editorial Comun published her autobiographical comic Virus Tropical, in which Powerpaola explores her difficult childhood as a rebellious daughter in the conservative environment of a Colombian family. The comic was enthusiastically reviewed, translated into French, Italian, and Brazilian, and made into a film in 2017 (the film was screened at the 2018 Berlinale, among other festivals). The German translation by Lea Hübner was published by Parallelallee in 2022. Since then, Powerpaola has published the graphic novels QP (2014), Todo va a estar bien (2015), Nos vamos (2016), and Todas las bicicletas que tuve (2022), in which she explores themes of sexuality, feminism, family, and identity.

Powerpaola has co-founded artist collectives such as the Medellín group Taller 7 and the internationally operating Chicks on Comics, and has been involved on collaborative works – magazines such as Mates, Strapazin, Chicks on Comics publications such as Synergy Boat – or the volume Tierra larga (2019), in duo with Pablo Besse as no tan parecidos. She is also represented in anthologies such as El Volcán (2019) and Drawing power: women’s stories of sexual violence, harassment, and survival (2020). Most recently, she contributed to the calendar Chicas de Calendario 2022, and illustrated the volume Mostras del Rock by Barbi Recanati (Argentina) about the under-reported history of female rock legends (2021).