Biography

Justin Neely is an artist, writer, editor and technologist living in Brooklyn, New York. His art practice is anchored in painting, but includes mixed media projects, critical writing, editing and work in digital media.

Neely is the cowriter (with illustrator Ai Tatebayashi) of A Good Life in Hell (2015), an illustrated book about the life of Sumiteru Taniguchi, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic blast, and his wife Eiko. His visual artwork has appeared this year in shows in Brooklyn, Berlin and Toronto. His hand-drawn digital lettering adorns pianist Ethan Iverson's award-winning jazz blog, Do The Math.

A self-taught technologist with two decades of experience, he taught information design and web architecture for almost five years as an adjunct lecturer at New York City College of Technology (CUNY).

Neely has an undergraduate degree from Amherst College, where he majored in both French and English with a concentration in film studies. He completed a master’s degree in international policy studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. While there he pursued in-depth research on both Russo-Japanese relations in the context of cinematic representations of national identity and the role of information technology in intelligence and security policy.

Both an autodidact and a believer in the value of continuing education, Neely has also completed courses in 20th century American art history, nonlinear editing, film production, analog photography and Japanese architecture. He has studied eight languages other than English (French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, Latin and—most recently—Irish) and often uses transliteration and translation in his artwork.

Neely's varied academic and professional background strongly informs his choice of subjects, diverse modes of production and disinclination for overt conceptual frameworks in artmaking. Neely embraces outsider techniques while engaging with insider critical and historical narratives.

(photo credit bottom left: Zach Desart)

Contact

email: art@justinneely.com     phone: 718-306-9914

Studio

Red Hook Waterfront
Brooklyn, NY