Noam Sienna is a scholar of Jewish culture, an educator, and a book artist. Originally from Toronto, Noam received his PhD in Jewish History and Museum Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2020, and holds degrees in Religious Studies, Classics, and Anthropology from from the University of Toronto and Brandeis University. He is currently the Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar in Jewish Book Arts at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers-New Brunswick, where he collaborates with the Rutgers Initiative for the Book and the Scarlet Letterpress to integrate Jewish Studies and hands-on book history. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
As an educator, Dr. Sienna has taught and lectured about Jewish cultural heritage at academic and community venues around the world. He is also a practicing book artist whose work brings together historical and contemporary expressions of Jewish visual and textual culture, focusing on reviving and preserving traditions of Hebrew calligraphy and Jewish letterpress printing.
Dr. Sienna’s academic work has focused on Jewish communities in the Islamic world, from the Middle Ages to the present. His first monograph, entitled Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds, examines the changing contexts of Jewish book culture in the Maghreb in the 17th through 19th centuries; it received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. He is currently writing a socio-bibliographic study of the first Hebrew press in the Ottoman Empire.
He has also served as a research assistant, educational consultant, and co-curator for exhibitions and programs at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, the Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
His first book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia: Print-O-Craft, 2019), collects 120 primary sources for the study of LGBTQ Jewish history, with introductions and extensive bibliography. It was awarded the 2020 Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and the 2020 Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.