Leela Corman is an illustrator, cartoonist, and Middle Eastern dancer. She studied painting, printmaking, and illustration at Massachusetts College of Art. 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, won Le Prix Millepages in 2013, 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.