Happy Women’s History Month! Help JWA continue to lift up Jewish women’s stories, this month and every month, by making a gift today!
Close [x]

Show [+]

Liana Finck

b. 1986

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Liana Finck until we are able to commission a full entry.

Cartoonist Liana Finck in 2009, photo courtesy of Liana Finck.

Liana Finck finds new angles of approach into her life and Jewish history through her whimsical and expressive autobiographical cartoons. Finck graduated from The Cooper Union in New York in 2008 and earned a Fulbright Fellowship in Belgium to work on a project about the life of Georges Remi, the cartoonist who created the Tintin books. It was there, in 2010, that she first got the idea for her graphic novel, A Bintel Brief, published in 2014. The graphic novel interweaves illustrations of the eponymous advice column that ran in the Forward newspaper in the early 1900s with vignettes on Finck’s imagined conversations with the paper’s editor, Abraham Cahan. In 2012 she created a short collage series on the golem for Tablet, and for several years she ran an illustrated column in the Forward online. She regularly draws cartoons for the New Yorker, Catapult, and The Awl (until its closure in 2018). Finck also shares her work both on Substack and Instagram, where nearly 600,000 followers devour her illustrated commentary on heartbreak and social anxiety, and prints of her artwork are available for purchase on her website. In 2018 her graphic memoir Passing for Human was published, followed a year later by Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self, a selection of her comics. Finck designed the cover art for Ariana Grande’s May 2020 single “Stuck With U”; all net profits from the song were donated to First Responders Children’s Foundation. In 2022, Finck wrote and illustrated Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation in 2022, a graphic novel reimagining the Book of Genesis and several biblical characters, most notably God, who is portrayed as a woman. You Broke It!, a children’s book, will be released in 2024. 

Donate

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

Get JWA in your inbox

Read the latest from JWA from your inbox.

sign up now

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Liana Finck." (Viewed on March 28, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/finck-liana>.