Cesario (Cee) Lavery is an illustrator, comics-maker, and educator living and working in Montreal, Canada. He is a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts' Research and Creation grant, as well as the Museum of Jewish Montreal's Grants for Creative and Cultural Exploration. His work has been featured in the Montreal Review of Books, THIS Magazine, Briarpatch, Shameless, and more.
Der Eydes is Lavery's in-progress serialized graphic memoir/biography about Polish-Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Chaim Shatan, a founder of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis. Der Eydes (Yiddish: The Witness) is an exploration of family history, family mystery, and the long shadows cast by war and trauma. While at MacDowell, he completed the third volume of this ongoing work, which will focus on Shatan's - and his own - connection to Czech writer Franz Kafka. He also produced a hand-cranked animated scroll illustrating Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein's Homel 1905-1928, which will premiere at Vancouver's Chutzpah Festival in November 2023.
