Leila Abdelrazaq (b. 1992, Chicago) is a Palestinian artist-scholar, author, and cultural organizer.
She earned her MA in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan in 2020, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow. Her scholarly work focuses broadly on questions related to Palestinian art, visual culture, futurity, and political imaginaries. She co-founded Maamoul Press, an award-winning, transnational independent arts and publishing project dedicated to uplifting by-us-for-us storytelling in comics and book arts from SWANA communities and beyond.
Leila’s debut graphic novel Baddawi (Just World Books, 2015), which she started as a webcomic while studying Theatre Arts as an undergraduate student at DePaul University, was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. Her comic novella The Opening was published by Tosh Fesh (Beirut) in 2017. Leila’s creative writing, essays, short comics, and illustrated editorials have been published in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Funambulist, The Believer, Mizna, Harper’s, Kohl: A Journal For Gender and Body Research, The FADER, South Side Weekly, and others. She has exhibited her work, participated in residencies, and given talks and workshops around the world, and her prints, zines, and artist books are housed in multiple public collections across Turtle Island and the UK. Leila has served as an invited guest editor for Mizna’s special Comix Issue as well as a juror for the 2018 Ignatz Awards. In 2022, Leila’s new speculative fiction graphic novel in progress, FIVE TIMES FAST, was honored by Creative Capital as a shortlisted project.
A self- and community-taught visual artist, Leila’s creative work is rooted in a DIY ethos and includes printmaking, book arts, installation, animation, and social practice. In her personal creative work, Leila’s intimate storytelling and bold illustrative style work together to engage audiences in conversations around refugeehood, nationalism, history, memory, and borders. Drawing on her background as a student activist and community organizer, Leila facilitates collaborative printmaking and art projects as sites for political daydreaming. Her work is designed to invite interaction, generate critical conversations, and disrupt dominant narratives, demanding that we dream up liberatory possibilities that are more expansive than what the current world order may permit.
︎ As seen in: VICE, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Salon, ThinkProgress, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al-Araby, The Rumpus (1, 2), Creative Exchange, and The Riveter.
