Noa Billick (she/her) is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, designer, and academic. She is a Doctoral Student in the Communications and Culture Ph.D. program at Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from OCAD University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Noa explores Jewish communication, ritual, and storytelling through material and craft. Her recent work engages with tradition and personal experience, creating objects that bridge historical practice with contemporary expression, reflecting the modern diasporic Jewish experience. Through hands-on making, she investigates how physical forms carry meaning, memory, and connection across time and place. Noa's projects often highlight the interconnectedness of storytelling and identity, emphasizing traditional objects as a medium through which people share and preserve experiences.
Central to Noa's research and art are themes of Jewish storytelling, material culture, ritual, and the symbolic power of books as vessels of memory and identity. Working across book arts, ceramics, and engaging in the concept of “handmade midrash”, Noa creates pieces that bridge tradition and contemporary life, from narrative-rich books like haggadot, to ritual objects such as seder plates. Through both scholarship and practice, she examines how Jewish objects and stories preserve culture while inviting new interpretations, emphasizing the sacred in everyday acts of making and telling.
Noa was raised in Montreal and is a big fan of the Oxford comma. She is on a mission to make the perfect bowl for cereal and soup (specifically matzah ball). She is lactose intolerant and has a cat named Oatmeal, who is also lactose intolerant.
Photo by Shay Markowitz.
Artist Statement
My work explores Jewish communication, ritual, and storytelling through material culture and craft. I create physical objects that engage with both historical tradition and personal experience, treating material as a bridge between past and present. Whether working with ceramics, textiles, paper, or something else, I am drawn to the tactile nature of making—how the physicality of an object carries meaning beyond words.
At the heart of my practice is an interest in how Jewish narratives are preserved, adapted, and embodied. I investigate the interplay between tradition and reinvention, often working with ritual objects to understand their role in shaping communal and individual identity. By making these objects myself, I engage with the labor, care, and improvisation embedded in Jewish creative expression.
My approach is research-driven and hands-on, informed by historical texts, material archives, and contemporary craft methodologies. I see making as a form of scholarship—one that invites dialogue between the artifact and the maker, between historical continuity and contemporary relevance.
Through this work, I aim to illuminate the ways Jewish material culture is both inherited and remade, emphasizing that tradition is not static but an active, evolving process—one that bridges generations through making, memory, and reinterpretation.
Noa is a Jewish artist reinventing the book form.
