Jonathan Homrighausen

Joanna Homrighausen writes and teaches at the intersection of sacred text, lettering arts, and scribal crafts. A Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Religion (Hebrew Bible) at Duke University. She also serves as Adjunct Lecturer in Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary, where she has taught the biblical Hebrew sequence, the history of ancient Israel, and a first-year seminar on ancient Jewish and Christian pilgrimage. She is the author of Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: Calligraphy, the Song of Songs, and The Saint John’s Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022). She also co-leads, with poet Fred Levy, a monthly Torah study for Temple Sinai in Newport News, VA.

Her writings on Jewish art mainly focus on contemporary calligraphers and letterers. In 2021, during lockdown, she curated a virtual exhibit, Visual Music: Calligraphy and Sacred Texts for the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary, which included works by Avraham Borshevsky, Izzy Pludwinski, Michel d’Anastasio, and Peretz Wolf-Prusan. Her dissertation, Writing Esther, engages several Jewish artists’ takes on the Book of Esther, including Mark Podwal, Arthur Szyk, Nava Levine-Coren, and the painters of the thjrd-century Dura-Europos synagogue. Her forthcoming articles include an essay in Michael Shapiro’s Ketubah Renaissance: An Artful Revival in Our Time (Jewish Publication Society) and an essay on Gabriel Wolff for a volume on tattoos and religions titled Sacred Ink.