Leela Corman

Leela Corman is a painter, educator and comics maker. She creates entirely hand-painted comics and graphic novels in watercolor, gouache and acrylics and works primarily with Polish-Jewish history and life, in both her fiction and nonfiction comics, 20th-century New York history, trauma, loss and (occasionally) music. The second book in her New York trilogy—Victory Parade, a graphic novel about women working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Second World War, a Jewish refugee turned amateur women’s wrestling champ, and the astral plane over Buchenwald—was published in the spring of 2024 by Schocken-Pantheon.

Corman’s short-form comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Nautilus, The Nib and other magazines. She has created art for The New York Times, NY Press, BUST Magazine, for books on subjects ranging from urban gardening to the fashion history, album art for the Mountain Goats, and tour poster art for Neko Case, Thalia Zedek Band and Live Skull. She is a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop, a freestanding school for comics and graphic novels based in Gainesville, FL. Past books include the graphic novel Unterzakhn (Schocken-Pantheon, 2012), You Are Not a Guest (Fieldmouse Press, 2023), Victory Parade (Penguin Random House, 2024) and the short comics collection We All Wish for Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Plant, 2016).

Her teaching philosophy centers the direct physical experience of making art by hand with unpredictable physical materials and the use of cross-disciplinary practices to arrive at powerful visual storytelling. It is in practice, rather than theory, that we find ourselves as artists. She is most interested in, as the artist William Kentridge says, “understanding the world as process rather than as fact.”