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Saturday, November 14, 2026
5:00 PM
Shifting Grounds: Gallery Exhibition and Opening Event
CPR - Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA
Shifting Grounds: New Jewish Art Festival is a two-day multidisciplinary festival exploring the range of art created by Jewish artists working in and around Brooklyn today. Presented by The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life, the weekend features a group exhibition, two evening performance programs and a Sunday morning workshop for families.
On Saturday, November 14, join us for an Opening Event celebrating the Shifting Grounds group exhibition.
Opening reception:
Saturday, November 14, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
A performance by Maya Oren will take place during the opening reception.
Gallery hours:
Saturday, November 14, 3:00 PM - 8:30PM
Sunday, November 15, 10:00 AM - 7:30 PM
Shifting Grounds brings together fifteen artists from this year's interdisciplinary Artist Working Group, working across a range of materials and artistic approaches, the works examine how memories are preserved, transformed, and passed down across generations. Family archives, religious symbols, inherited objects, and everyday materials become sites of inquiry, bringing new perspectives to familiar, overlooked, or hidden narratives and customs. Through the materials, rituals, and stories we carry into the present, the works invite us to experience time not only as a linear progression, but also as a cyclical return or a hidden seed waiting to emerge.
Several works draw on Jewish rituals and cultural traditions, exploring their meanings while imagining new ways of engaging with spirituality and culture. Others turn toward the natural world, exploring processes of growth, erosion, transformation, and care. Together, these works consider how these connections to the past and our surroundings can inform the ways we engage with and act in the world today.
Rather than presenting Jewish identity as fixed or singular, the exhibition brings together a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives. Moving between the intimate and the collective, Shifting Grounds invites viewers to locate themselves within an ever-changing landscape, where places, memories, and perspectives intersect, and new ways of understanding ourselves and one another can emerge.
Participating artists:
Roni Aviv, Keren Benbenisty, Taylor Bluestine, Sari Carel, Serena Feingold, Dolores Furtado, Matt Jones, Casey Kaufman, Yael Magnes, Stacy Mehrfar, Maya Oren, Helen Rubinstein, Jessica Segall, Hilla Shapira, Eva Sturm-Gross. Curated by Renana Neuman.
Featured Artists
Roni Aviv
Roni Aviv is a photographer and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. Aviv works with photography, text, and mark making to give form to a psychological space of re-processing experiences. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Recent solo exhibitions include CEPA Gallery, NY and Real Art Ways, CT. Recent group exhibitions include Voltz Clarke Gallery, NY, The Bronx Museum, NY, Center for Book Arts, NY, Longwood Art Gallery, NY, and The Jewish Museum, NY.
Aviv is a grant recipient of Artis Contemporary (2025, 2021) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2024). Residencies and fellowships include Mildreds Lane (2019), NARS Foundation (2021), Center for Book Arts NY (2022), AIM Bronx Museum (2023), Centrum (2024), ProjectArt (2024-25), Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts(2025), and Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (2026).
Aviv is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and College of Staten Island, as well as a teaching artist with Josephine Herrick Project, Creative Aging NYPL, and the International Center of Photography - ICP.
Recent solo exhibitions include CEPA Gallery, NY and Real Art Ways, CT. Recent group exhibitions include Voltz Clarke Gallery, NY, The Bronx Museum, NY, Center for Book Arts, NY, Longwood Art Gallery, NY, and The Jewish Museum, NY.
Aviv is a grant recipient of Artis Contemporary (2025, 2021) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2024). Residencies and fellowships include Mildreds Lane (2019), NARS Foundation (2021), Center for Book Arts NY (2022), AIM Bronx Museum (2023), Centrum (2024), ProjectArt (2024-25), Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts(2025), and Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (2026).
Aviv is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and College of Staten Island, as well as a teaching artist with Josephine Herrick Project, Creative Aging NYPL, and the International Center of Photography - ICP.
Keren Benbenisty
Keren Benbenisty lived and worked in Paris from 1998 to 2011, where she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2004. During this time, she spent a semester at CalArts, California, as part of a master's exchange program. In 2011, she relocated to New York City, where she continues to live and work.
Her interdisciplinary practice is research-based and place-driven: each project begins with a specific geographic site and the historical, scientific, or cultural narratives embedded within it. These localized stories become entry points for exploring broader questions of migration, loss, and displacement. Across film and works on paper, Benbenisty works with organic materials—such as fish skins, citrus peels, and silkworm cocoons—as both medium and metaphor, employing processes of metamorphosis and decay to examine transformation and fragility.
Benbenisty has been artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; ISCP – The International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Residency Unlimited, New York; Arts Maebashi, Japan; Open Sessions, The Drawing Center, New York; Artport, Israel; Air351, Portugal; The Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Belgium; and L'Appartement 22, Rabat, Morocco.
She has been the recipient of numerous international grants and awards, including the NYSCA Grant (2026); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019); Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant; FLAD Luso-American Development Foundation Grant; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, New York; and Ostrovsky Family Foundation Grant, New York.
Benbenisty's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Ulterior Gallery, New York; Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, France; Arts Maebashi, Japan; The Drawing Center, New York; Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague, Czech Republic; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.
Her interdisciplinary practice is research-based and place-driven: each project begins with a specific geographic site and the historical, scientific, or cultural narratives embedded within it. These localized stories become entry points for exploring broader questions of migration, loss, and displacement. Across film and works on paper, Benbenisty works with organic materials—such as fish skins, citrus peels, and silkworm cocoons—as both medium and metaphor, employing processes of metamorphosis and decay to examine transformation and fragility.
Benbenisty has been artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; ISCP – The International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Residency Unlimited, New York; Arts Maebashi, Japan; Open Sessions, The Drawing Center, New York; Artport, Israel; Air351, Portugal; The Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Belgium; and L'Appartement 22, Rabat, Morocco.
She has been the recipient of numerous international grants and awards, including the NYSCA Grant (2026); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019); Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant; FLAD Luso-American Development Foundation Grant; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, New York; and Ostrovsky Family Foundation Grant, New York.
Benbenisty's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Ulterior Gallery, New York; Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, France; Arts Maebashi, Japan; The Drawing Center, New York; Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague, Czech Republic; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.
Taylor Bluestine
Taylor Bluestine is a practicing interdisciplinary artist and arts administrator from New York City. Her practice is grounded in ceramics and its history, engaging with both ancient and contemporary iconography and techniques. Her sculptures meld everyday images from her personal archive with hand built stoneware forms, using diagrammatical structures to chart connectivity and meaning-making. She currently serves as the Communications and Programs Manager at A.I.R. Gallery, a historic feminist artist cooperative located in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Barnard College. Her writing has been published in IMPULSE magazine. Outside of her work in the arts, Bluestine enjoys reading, playing video games, and taking very long walks everywhere in the city.
Sari Carel
Based in Brooklyn, New York, much of multi-media artist Sari Carel's work focuses on translation from one modality to another. Her projects consider interspecies communication, relationships between people and place, and how the senses inform our perception.
Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles, and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency on Governors Island, New York; and the Bundanon Residency, in Australia.
Recent solo exhibitions include A More Perfect Circle, a public art project presented by KODA and curated by Jennifer McGregor in NYC, The Sun Is A Mouth Of Blue at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR, The Shape Of Play, a public art project curated by Now & There and commissioned by Jewish Arts Alliance in Boston’s North End, and Mud Songs For Anni at The Schneider Museum Of Art’s Art Beyond in Ashland, OR.
Here work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Observer and Art Spiel among other publications.
Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles, and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency on Governors Island, New York; and the Bundanon Residency, in Australia.
Recent solo exhibitions include A More Perfect Circle, a public art project presented by KODA and curated by Jennifer McGregor in NYC, The Sun Is A Mouth Of Blue at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR, The Shape Of Play, a public art project curated by Now & There and commissioned by Jewish Arts Alliance in Boston’s North End, and Mud Songs For Anni at The Schneider Museum Of Art’s Art Beyond in Ashland, OR.
Here work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Observer and Art Spiel among other publications.
Serena Feingold
Serena Feingold is an artist and scholar of Jewish material culture. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, with concentrations in metalsmithing, ceramics, and painting, and a Master of Arts in Judaic Studies from the Rothberg International School at Hebrew University. Her career has included work for community arts nonprofits in Boston and Washington, D.C., collaboratively designing and fabricating large-scale public murals and mosaics and teaching arts fundamentals. She has held positions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Jewish Museum in New York, where she has researched and presented aspects of Jewish material culture spanning ancient archeology to Medieval manuscripts to early Modern art.
She is the owner and creator of Bina (soon to be renamed The Gathering Sea), a small-batch studio selling hand fabricated jewelry and objects. Her illustrations are featured in The World at Our Table: A Euro-American Cookbook of Family Favorites, Abbondanza, Paper Bridge, and other titles published by Plamen Press.
As a creator, Serena is fascinated by the human desire to make meaning through rituals and the objects that facilitate them. Her work pulls at the threads between spirit and rationality, and she is deeply interested in understanding the human compulsions behind ritualistic systems. Her work is inspired by that human instinct, as well as by the aesthetics of older forms of making, such as early Greek and Medieval arts, in which the hand of an object’s maker can be felt in its form. At times, her work strives to marry the intricacies of Jewish history with the equal complexities of today’s life, while at others, it aims simply to celebrate the joys of crafting, and the beauty of things made by hand.
She is the owner and creator of Bina (soon to be renamed The Gathering Sea), a small-batch studio selling hand fabricated jewelry and objects. Her illustrations are featured in The World at Our Table: A Euro-American Cookbook of Family Favorites, Abbondanza, Paper Bridge, and other titles published by Plamen Press.
As a creator, Serena is fascinated by the human desire to make meaning through rituals and the objects that facilitate them. Her work pulls at the threads between spirit and rationality, and she is deeply interested in understanding the human compulsions behind ritualistic systems. Her work is inspired by that human instinct, as well as by the aesthetics of older forms of making, such as early Greek and Medieval arts, in which the hand of an object’s maker can be felt in its form. At times, her work strives to marry the intricacies of Jewish history with the equal complexities of today’s life, while at others, it aims simply to celebrate the joys of crafting, and the beauty of things made by hand.
Dolores Furtado
Dolores Furtado (b.1977, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in New York. Her latest solo exhibitions include: “Vestigio”, Proxyco Gallery, New York, USA (2023) ; ”Supernatural”, Kingsborough College Museum, Brooklyn (2019), “Lo nube”, Vasari Gallery, Buenos Aires (2018) and “Ultimate Nature”, duo show with Cecilia Biagini, Clemente Soto Cultural Center, New York City (2017).
Recent groups shows include: “Ocultismo y barro”, Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn (2022)“Greater New York 2021”, Moma PS1, Queens (2021); “Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020”, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, (2020); 4th AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017); Epsilon, abstracciones descentradas, MACBA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (2016); Arcos de Conexión, Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2014);
She completed the following residency programs: La nueva Fabrica Residency Program, Antigua, Guatemala; Casa Wabi Residency Program, ArtReview Award 2023, Mexico; Urban Glass 2022 Visiting Artist and Designer Fellowship, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Greenwich House Pottery Residency Program, NYC, USA (2020); Oak Spring Garden Foundation 2019 Artist in Residence Program, Virginia, USA (2019); 2018 FSP/Jerome Fellowship, Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota, USA (2018); Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program, Bronx, NY, USA (2017); NYFA Immigrant Artist Program, Brooklyn, NY, USA (2016), among others.
As a sculptor, she investigates relations between the body, form, and history through a physical and spiritual process of direct engagement with matter. Her practice explores the transformative power of materials and their correlation with cycles of regeneration and rebirth. Her work engages with earth based materials to signal the memory of time.
In a broad sense, she investigates the past (history) through a process based practice that highlights all its accidents and tactile evidence.
Recent groups shows include: “Ocultismo y barro”, Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn (2022)“Greater New York 2021”, Moma PS1, Queens (2021); “Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020”, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, (2020); 4th AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017); Epsilon, abstracciones descentradas, MACBA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (2016); Arcos de Conexión, Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2014);
She completed the following residency programs: La nueva Fabrica Residency Program, Antigua, Guatemala; Casa Wabi Residency Program, ArtReview Award 2023, Mexico; Urban Glass 2022 Visiting Artist and Designer Fellowship, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Greenwich House Pottery Residency Program, NYC, USA (2020); Oak Spring Garden Foundation 2019 Artist in Residence Program, Virginia, USA (2019); 2018 FSP/Jerome Fellowship, Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota, USA (2018); Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program, Bronx, NY, USA (2017); NYFA Immigrant Artist Program, Brooklyn, NY, USA (2016), among others.
As a sculptor, she investigates relations between the body, form, and history through a physical and spiritual process of direct engagement with matter. Her practice explores the transformative power of materials and their correlation with cycles of regeneration and rebirth. Her work engages with earth based materials to signal the memory of time.
In a broad sense, she investigates the past (history) through a process based practice that highlights all its accidents and tactile evidence.
Matt Jones
Matt Jones (b. 1980, Rochester, NY) is a painter based in New York City. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union and his MFA from Hunter College and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Jones has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, with solo and two-person exhibitions in New York, Paris, Seattle, and Maine. His work has been presented at venues including The Hole (New York), Galerie Jérôme Pauchant (Paris), Studio e (Seattle), the Hudson Opera House, and the Jewish Museum of Maine. His paintings and works on paper have been written about in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artcritical.
Jones’ practice moves fluidly between painting and drawing, often developing multiple bodies of work simultaneously. He works in serial structures, allowing images to recur and shift across surfaces over time. Familiar forms—eyes, suns, hands, vegetal and architectural elements—return in altered configurations, accumulating meaning through repetition rather than resolving into fixed narratives.
Jones’ work explores perception and layered time. He is interested in how images hold experience: how memory, observation, and imagination coexist within a single surface. Through repetition and variation, the paintings invite sustained looking and resist singular interpretation.
His process is iterative and dialogic. Drawings generate paintings; paintings generate further drawings. Meaning emerges relationally—between images, within and between bodies of work, and through the viewer’s encounter. Rather than illustrating ideas, Jones constructs perceptual fields in which attention itself becomes the subject.
Jones’ practice moves fluidly between painting and drawing, often developing multiple bodies of work simultaneously. He works in serial structures, allowing images to recur and shift across surfaces over time. Familiar forms—eyes, suns, hands, vegetal and architectural elements—return in altered configurations, accumulating meaning through repetition rather than resolving into fixed narratives.
Jones’ work explores perception and layered time. He is interested in how images hold experience: how memory, observation, and imagination coexist within a single surface. Through repetition and variation, the paintings invite sustained looking and resist singular interpretation.
His process is iterative and dialogic. Drawings generate paintings; paintings generate further drawings. Meaning emerges relationally—between images, within and between bodies of work, and through the viewer’s encounter. Rather than illustrating ideas, Jones constructs perceptual fields in which attention itself becomes the subject.
Casey Kaufman
Casey Kaufman (b.1995, Sacramento, California) is a Brooklyn-based photographic and multi-media artist with a love of portrait and landscape photography. Following the completion of his MFA at Parsons School of Design in 2021, Casey has shifted to a conceptual photo practice focused on investigating his family's Jewish history and family photographs as a vehicle for exploring how and why certain narratives become part of national history and how others get left in the past. Casey’s work has been exhibited in galleries in Hungary, Italy, China, and across the US.
Casey’s work engages in the connections between photography, memory and political history. In an effort to understand his Jewish origins and family history in the United States and their relationship to American historical narratives, Casey uses his family’s photos to highlight the critical role photography plays in constructing history and how we perceive the past. From loved one’s clothing to family photographs, Casey uses a mix of materials to encourage one to think of the images missing from national and historical canons as well as asking how and why some photographs are confined to the past, while others are propelled in our constant present. Casey believes that the ideological motivations that underpin the prevailing stories of Jewish history in America, at best, limit our understanding of Jewish history and at worst, serve as a justification for violence in service of western hegemony.
If you have a broken film camera or photography equipment, you should tell Casey. He will enthusiastically attempt to fix it while chatting with you about his favorite artist Michael Rakowitz and the complexities of advanced view camera focusing techniques.
Casey’s work engages in the connections between photography, memory and political history. In an effort to understand his Jewish origins and family history in the United States and their relationship to American historical narratives, Casey uses his family’s photos to highlight the critical role photography plays in constructing history and how we perceive the past. From loved one’s clothing to family photographs, Casey uses a mix of materials to encourage one to think of the images missing from national and historical canons as well as asking how and why some photographs are confined to the past, while others are propelled in our constant present. Casey believes that the ideological motivations that underpin the prevailing stories of Jewish history in America, at best, limit our understanding of Jewish history and at worst, serve as a justification for violence in service of western hegemony.
If you have a broken film camera or photography equipment, you should tell Casey. He will enthusiastically attempt to fix it while chatting with you about his favorite artist Michael Rakowitz and the complexities of advanced view camera focusing techniques.
Yael Magnes
Yael Magnes is a Brooklyn based award-winning metalsmith, artist, and designer born in 1975 in Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine. After first encountering metalsmithing, she pursued a degree in jewelry design at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. In 2005, she moved to New York City to co-found a high-end handbag brand with her two sisters. Since 2010, Magnes has developed her independent conceptual art jewelry practice, creating primarily one-of-a-kind works that question the identity and definition of a jewel. She seeks a space where beauty, function, comfort, and imagination intersect.
One question persists throughout her work: what is the line between art, design, and jewelry? Her objects function as frameworks for inquiry, examining how material and placement shape perception and meaning. In her recent body of work, Broken into Sum, she explores the experience of fracture—personal and collective—and the possibility of reconstruction. Using mirrors as both material and metaphor, she reflects on “night” as a black mirror: a surface that reveals beauty or fear depending on one’s state of being. Broken mirrored elements evoke fractured identity and the ongoing process of redefinition. Crafting jewelry, for Magnes, is inherently a labor of love —demanding repetition, refinement, and perseverance. Through making, breaking, and rebuilding, she proposes resilience not as restoration to what was, but as a sustainable reimagining of self, community and what can be.
One question persists throughout her work: what is the line between art, design, and jewelry? Her objects function as frameworks for inquiry, examining how material and placement shape perception and meaning. In her recent body of work, Broken into Sum, she explores the experience of fracture—personal and collective—and the possibility of reconstruction. Using mirrors as both material and metaphor, she reflects on “night” as a black mirror: a surface that reveals beauty or fear depending on one’s state of being. Broken mirrored elements evoke fractured identity and the ongoing process of redefinition. Crafting jewelry, for Magnes, is inherently a labor of love —demanding repetition, refinement, and perseverance. Through making, breaking, and rebuilding, she proposes resilience not as restoration to what was, but as a sustainable reimagining of self, community and what can be.
Stacy Mehrfar
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar is an Iranian-American visual artist based in New York City. Mehrfar's photographs, video installations, and photobooks explore the dynamics of belonging and how individuals form meaning through embodied presence in place.
Mehrfar has exhibited her works at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, New York; Les Champs Libres, Rennes, France; TEDxSydney, Australia; and ANU Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel. A 2022 Silver List nominee and 2025 LABA Fellow, she has received the Joseph Robert Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, and the Australian Postgraduate Award. She is a Studio Arts resident at the Clemente Center, and has participated in residencies at Interlude Foundation, I-Park Foundation, and the Wassaic Project. Her work has received positive coverage in New Art City, 1000 Words, Collector Daily, L'œil de la Photographie, British Journal of Photography, and The New Yorker. Portfolios of her work have appeared in Der Greif, Artist Profile, and Fraction magazines. Her most recent monograph, The Moon Belongs to Everyone, was published by GOST Books, London, in 2021. Mehrfar holds an MFA in Photomedia from the University of NSW School of Art and Design, Sydney, Australia, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Certificate in Creative Practices from ICP, New York. Arezou, her middle name, means "wish" in Farsi.
Mehrfar has exhibited her works at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, New York; Les Champs Libres, Rennes, France; TEDxSydney, Australia; and ANU Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel. A 2022 Silver List nominee and 2025 LABA Fellow, she has received the Joseph Robert Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, and the Australian Postgraduate Award. She is a Studio Arts resident at the Clemente Center, and has participated in residencies at Interlude Foundation, I-Park Foundation, and the Wassaic Project. Her work has received positive coverage in New Art City, 1000 Words, Collector Daily, L'œil de la Photographie, British Journal of Photography, and The New Yorker. Portfolios of her work have appeared in Der Greif, Artist Profile, and Fraction magazines. Her most recent monograph, The Moon Belongs to Everyone, was published by GOST Books, London, in 2021. Mehrfar holds an MFA in Photomedia from the University of NSW School of Art and Design, Sydney, Australia, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Certificate in Creative Practices from ICP, New York. Arezou, her middle name, means "wish" in Farsi.
Maya Oren
Maya Ojalvo Oren is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, photographer, event producer, and creative director whose work explores ritual, memory, and belonging across diasporic identities. With over fourteen years of experience spanning visual storytelling, she has collaborated with brands, cultural spaces, and independent organizations to create work that is both intimate and immersive.
Her background as a third-culture Jewish woman of Israeli and Trinidadian heritage informs a practice rooted in sensory memory, ancestral continuity, and the search for home beyond geography.
Oren is the founder of MOJALVO, a creative studio specializing in narrative-driven content and brand programming, and the creator of Safta, a lifestyle platform devoted to slowness, ritual, and matriarchal wisdom. Alongside her visual work, she produces participatory gatherings that blend art, ceremony, and community-building. Her intuitive talismanic jewelry practice treats adornment as both aesthetic object and energetic vessel, with each handcrafted piece designed to hold intention, transition, or remembrance.
Oren’s work moves fluidly between image, object, and experience, united by a commitment to making the intangible tangible. Drawing from diasporic traditions and contemporary ritual practices, she creates photographs, films, adornments, and ceremonies that invite reflection, connection, and embodied presence. Her bead ceremony series transforms the simple act of threading into a collective rite—an opportunity for participants to translate personal narrative into form while being witnessed in community.
Across mediums, Oren is interested in how beauty, slowness, and tactile creation can serve as tools for repair in a fragmented world. By elevating everyday gestures into intentional acts, her practice offers spaces where memory can be honored, new traditions can emerge, and a sense of home can be rediscovered within the self.
Her background as a third-culture Jewish woman of Israeli and Trinidadian heritage informs a practice rooted in sensory memory, ancestral continuity, and the search for home beyond geography.
Oren is the founder of MOJALVO, a creative studio specializing in narrative-driven content and brand programming, and the creator of Safta, a lifestyle platform devoted to slowness, ritual, and matriarchal wisdom. Alongside her visual work, she produces participatory gatherings that blend art, ceremony, and community-building. Her intuitive talismanic jewelry practice treats adornment as both aesthetic object and energetic vessel, with each handcrafted piece designed to hold intention, transition, or remembrance.
Oren’s work moves fluidly between image, object, and experience, united by a commitment to making the intangible tangible. Drawing from diasporic traditions and contemporary ritual practices, she creates photographs, films, adornments, and ceremonies that invite reflection, connection, and embodied presence. Her bead ceremony series transforms the simple act of threading into a collective rite—an opportunity for participants to translate personal narrative into form while being witnessed in community.
Across mediums, Oren is interested in how beauty, slowness, and tactile creation can serve as tools for repair in a fragmented world. By elevating everyday gestures into intentional acts, her practice offers spaces where memory can be honored, new traditions can emerge, and a sense of home can be rediscovered within the self.
Helen Betya Rubinstein
Helen Betya Rubinstein is the author of Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power, and The Case Against Rubinstein: An Anti-Fiction, forthcoming in 2026 and 2027 from the University of New Orleans Press, as well as a booklet of lyric fictions, Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song (2022). Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, and Jewish Currents, and awarded fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and others. Raised in New Orleans, Helen is a writing coach in ongoing practice with writers across genre, and a professor at The New School.
Helen is interested in subverting conventions of narrative, staging divergent voices in conversation, and using the personal as a prism for investigating questions of social and political consequence.
Helen is interested in subverting conventions of narrative, staging divergent voices in conversation, and using the personal as a prism for investigating questions of social and political consequence.
Jessica Segall
Hostile and threatened landscapes are the sites for Jessica’s work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Jessica’s work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings, examining a queer ecology. Jessica exhibits her work internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, The Coreana Museum of Art, The Havana Bienal, The Queens Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The National Museum of Jewish American History and The Bangkok Biennial. Jessica is a Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Mondriaan Fonds, The Berlin Senate and The Smithsonian Institute. She attended residencies at Van Eyck Academie, MacDowell, Skowhegan, The New Mexico Museum of Art and Caltech. Jessica’s work is in the public collections of the Museum de Domijnen, The Aura Asia Art Foundation and The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. Her work has been in Cabinet Magazine, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, The New York Times and Art Forum. She received her MFA from Columbia University.
Hilla Shapira
Hilla Shapira is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice explores the tensions between common design and bodily regimen. Originally from Tel Aviv and now based in Brooklyn, NY, she uses functional, often mundane objects to question design conventions and expose the politics embedded in the things we wear, touch, and use daily.
Shapira’s work moves fluidly between textiles, wearables, installation, and performance, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between the designed world and the human body. Her process begins with examining everyday objects and researching their design history.By shifting scale, altering weight, or manipulating color and material, she alters the essence and expectations of objects.
In addition to this material exploration, her research focuses on the spiritual function of objects. As a queer woman from a Jewish Orthodox background, she seeks to reclaim religious discourse and the ownership of God.
In her work, she references Jewish iconography and Hebrew scripture, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary queer perspectives. She is interested in what transforms a symbol into an icon, and how ritual objects and popular imagery can be reimagined to foster a more inclusive religion.
Her work has been exhibited at Art Basel (Miami, FL), the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (PA), the Detroit LGBTQ+ Biennale (MI), NY Textile Month (NYC), Jerusalem Design Week (Israel), NY Jewelry Week (NYC), Neve Schechter Gallery (Tel Aviv), Hansen House (Jerusalem), the Textile Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY),Brooklyn Metal Works (Brooklyn, NY), and Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI).
She has participated in artist residencies including the Textile Arts Center WIP (Brooklyn, NY), Carrizozo Artist in Residence (NM), Popps Packing (Hamtramck, MI), and the Neve Schechter Center (Tel Aviv).
Her work has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, NY Jewish Week, Metalsmith Magazine, Portfolio Magazine, Haaretz, and The Jerusalem Post.
Shapira’s work moves fluidly between textiles, wearables, installation, and performance, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between the designed world and the human body. Her process begins with examining everyday objects and researching their design history.By shifting scale, altering weight, or manipulating color and material, she alters the essence and expectations of objects.
In addition to this material exploration, her research focuses on the spiritual function of objects. As a queer woman from a Jewish Orthodox background, she seeks to reclaim religious discourse and the ownership of God.
In her work, she references Jewish iconography and Hebrew scripture, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary queer perspectives. She is interested in what transforms a symbol into an icon, and how ritual objects and popular imagery can be reimagined to foster a more inclusive religion.
Her work has been exhibited at Art Basel (Miami, FL), the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (PA), the Detroit LGBTQ+ Biennale (MI), NY Textile Month (NYC), Jerusalem Design Week (Israel), NY Jewelry Week (NYC), Neve Schechter Gallery (Tel Aviv), Hansen House (Jerusalem), the Textile Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY),Brooklyn Metal Works (Brooklyn, NY), and Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI).
She has participated in artist residencies including the Textile Arts Center WIP (Brooklyn, NY), Carrizozo Artist in Residence (NM), Popps Packing (Hamtramck, MI), and the Neve Schechter Center (Tel Aviv).
Her work has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, NY Jewish Week, Metalsmith Magazine, Portfolio Magazine, Haaretz, and The Jerusalem Post.
Eva Sturm-Gross
Eva Sturm-Gross is a Brooklyn-based artist and woodworker. Drawing from theology, mysticism, and narrative traditions, her practice explores the intersection of traditional craft and visual exegesis. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Religious Studies from Oberlin College and has exhibited nationally at the Wharton Esherick Museum, Ohio Craft Museum, the Kent Museum, and Art Basel Miami Beach among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Penland School of Craft and currently teaches woodworking and carving in New York. Eva is the Art Director of Gashmius Magazine, an online publication putting out politically progressive Jewish content drawing from Hasidic and mystical sources. Her work engages themes of exile, redemption, and the sacred through embodied and narrative forms.
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