Welcome

Rafael Rachel Neis is an artist, writer, scholar, and educator.

Rafe’s art/research deploys different modalities including text, painting, mixed media, zines, and comics. Rafe is interested in the materiality and bodily experience of painting and drawing, as well as in form or the supposed boundary between abstraction and figuration. Their art/research incorporate questions about past/ancient worlds, more-than-human beings, Talmud, ritual, and bodily sensation.

Rafe is currently at work on several book-length projects: The Talmud: a Graphic Novel is one. And a graphic fictional autobiography is another. They are also in the midst of making a graphic guide to an ancient Jewish bestiary, tentatively entitled A Graphic Field Guide to Queer Jewish Creatures and Why.

In a somewhat more writerly vein, Rafael is working on a nonbinary history of ancient Jewish textual and visual culture, as well as a critical account of Jewish “law".”

Rafe lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a professor at the University of Michigan, and serves as president of the board of the Huckleberry Club, Detroit. Their artwork adorns a wall in the Huckleberry Club Salon, and it has been featured in the AJS Review, The Body Issue, in the Ancient Jew Review, in the Frankel Institute Annual, in collaborations with other artists, and it has found its way onto some book covers, among other destinations.

NEWS! Check out the new comicsplainer about When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven

(first page of comic below, for more click here.)

NEWS! When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species is out. Purchase your hard copy here. Open access available here. Thanks to UC Press, Luminos, and the UM Library’s TOME Award for making open access scholarship possible.