Leela Corman is an illustrator, cartoonist, and Middle Eastern dancer.. She studied painting, printmaking, and illustration at Massachusetts College of Art. She began her career in comics as an undergraduate, self-publishing three issues of her minicomic, Flimflam. This caught the eye of many readers and small press fans, and she went on to win a Xeric Grant in Fall 1999 for the publication of her first graphic novel, “Queen’s Day”. She published her second, “Subway Series”, with Alternative Books, and has also published numerous shorter pieces in anthologies in the US, Portugal, Spain, and France. Her latest book, Unterzakhn, a graphic novel set in the tenements, brothels, and vaudeville houses of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century, was published by Schocken/Pantheon in the spring of 2012, and has been nominated for the L.A. Times Book Award, the Eisner Award, and Le Prix Artemisia. in France.  It has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and Italian, and recently won an award for best Anglo-American comic at the Rome Festival. Portions of Unterzakhn were serialized in 2008 in the Forward, a storied Yiddish newspaper, and other excerpts ran in HEEB Magazine and Lilith magazine. Her short comics have run in Nautilus Magazine, The Nib, Tablet Magazine, Symbolia, and The OC Weekly. In 2014, her comic "Yahrzeit" won a silver medal from the Society Of Illustrators. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband Tom Hart and their daughter, Molly Rose.
She has illustrated books on topics that range from urban gardening to sex for the very busy to the history of the skirt, and has worked for a diverse array of editorial clients ranging from PBS and the New York Times to BUST Magazine and more.


Leela is represented by Wales Literary Agency