Leila Abdelrazaq
Email:
labdelrazaq@ucsd.edu
Website:
https://lalaleila.com/
Pronouns:
she/her/هي
Biography:
Leila Abdelrazaq (b. 1992, Chicago) is a Palestinian artist, author, and cultural organizer. She is a Ph.D. student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism + Art Practice at UC San Diego. Broadly, her work explores Palestinian and Arab visual/material culture and political imaginaries. She is particularly interested in printed ephemera, indigenous epistemologies, post-national imaginaries, and analog futures.
Leila’s debut graphic novel Baddawi (PM Press, 2015) was shortlised for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. Her research, creative writing, and comics have appeared in outlets including Mophradat, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Funambulist, The Believer, Mizna, and Kohl: A Journal For Gender and Body Research. She contributed a chapter on Palestinian futurist art and post-national imaginaries to the book Palestine, Visions and Imprints: Approaches to Histories of the Future (Sharjah Art Foundation/The Palestinian Museum, 2025).
Leila's posters, prints, and zines are housed in permanent collections including the Arab American National Museum, The Center for Book Arts, and the Special Collections at the Met Museum Watson Library. She has exhibited, spoken, and given workshops around the world. Her work has been supported by the A.M. Qattan Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Art Matters Foundation, CultureSource, and The Palestinian Museum.
Leila holds an MA in Modern Middle Eastern & North African Studies from the University of Michigan (2020) where she was a two-time FLAS Fellow and a recipient of the Mahfoud Bennoune Memorial Award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis. She also holds a BFA in Theatre Arts + BA in Arabic Studies from DePaul University (2015).
