Michal Raizen (pronounced Mi-CALL RI-zen) is a Researcher and Grant Development Specialist at Mango Consulting where she works with mission-driven nonprofits dedicated to empowering communities through healing arts programming, stabilization services, reentry support, workforce development, coalition building, and advocacy for policy change. Raizen sees herself as a storyteller whose role is to capture a client’s vision in clear and compelling language that funders can understand and appreciate. As a lifelong student, she enjoys the process of learning about diverse areas of impact and the role of the nonprofit sector as an ecosystem of care. 

Before joining Mango Consulting in 2021, Raizen was an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature with a subspecialty in Ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin (2014). During her doctoral studies, she focused on contemporary Hebrew, Arabic, and Francophone North African literature and film. Her research explored the ways in which authors and filmmakers from the Middle East and North Africa foregrounded music (lyrics, musical icons, technologies of sound, and recordings) to reflect on community and historical memory. Raizen has taught courses on cinemas of the Middle East, Arabic and Hebrew literatures, graphic and experimental novels of the Middle East, literary theory, and cosmopolitanism. Prior to pursuing an academic career, Raizen trained as a classical cellist and spent several years as a professional performer and music educator.

In 2022, Raizen joined the nonprofit We Amplify Voices on The Life Stories Project, an oral histories initiative aimed at documenting the stories of women serving lengthy or life sentences at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. As the Humanities lead on the project, Raizen worked with a group of “Storytellers” to co-create a method for gathering oral history interviews from each other. The oral history videos that emerged from the first phase of Life Stories have served as the foundation for subsequent projects including an empathy-building curriculum for trauma informed lawyering.

In her spare time, Raizen enjoys music and dance. She has danced Argentine tango for a decade and continues to grow and explore that practice. In July 2025, she attended the CU Tango Music Workshop where she worked with professional tango musicians and composers from around the world in an immersive performance experience.

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SELECT PUBLICATIONS

• “Hebrew-Arabic Translational Communities and the Recuperation of Arab-Jewish Literary Memory” Dibur 8, Spring 2020.
• “Sounding the Mizraḥi Voice: Ḥafla Thematics from the Ma’abara to the Post-Arabic Novel” in Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making. Eds. Nancy Berg and Naomi Sokoloff. Albany: SUNY Press (2020): 63-85.
• "Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: Comics and Comix." ArabLit: Arabic Literature in Translation. Ed. Marcia Lynx Qualey (May 2018).
• “The Text without Rupture: Jewish Itineraries of Mourning in Edmond El-Maleh’s Mediterranean” in Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis. Eds. Yasser Elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 87-103.