John J. Rais designs and creates one of a kind furniture, sculpture, and architectural metal art. His unique style blending traditional techniques with modern design applications has found a natural home in private residences as well as public museums and universities.

Rais has been engaged in the field of metalsmithing and applied design to all of his adult life. He has designed and created works for many architecturally significant buildings including a Frank Lloyd Wright home, Louis Kahn home, Addison Mizner home, and many others. In 2009 he began working on a Museum acquisition for Yale University Art Galleries as one of only three artists commissioned by Yale Art Galleries as part of the museum's massive renovation/expansion completed in 2012. The project is a series of 90 decorative panels that span the railing of the main staircase. Its design takes many cues from the building's Gothic Revival style and is influenced in part by some of the architectural ironwork in the museum by Samuel Yellin. The work is now part of the museum's permanent collection.

With “Connectivity”, Rais explores kinship via nature and everyday objects in a welcome celebration of compatibility in a time of separation and isolation. Finely detailed textures and delicately balanced natural forms belie the underlying steel, bringing the outdoors in with inviting warmth.

Rais received his masters of fine arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1998, after which he worked at Peters Valley Craft Center as a department head. Rais was a department head of blacksmithing at Peter's Valley from 1998 to 2001. He has run his own design and metalsmithing studio since 1998. He now resides in Philadelphia, PA.