top of page
Saturday, November 14, 2026
3:00 PM
Shifting Grounds: New Jewish Art Festival
CPR - Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA
Join us on Saturday, November 14, and Sunday, November 15, for a two-day multidisciplinary arts 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.
The featured artists were brought together by The Neighborhood’s 2026 Artist Working Group. Facilitated by artist and curator Renana Neuman and composer Alex Weiser, this group provided a forum for Jewish artists to connect and explore historical and contemporary facets of Jewish life in Brooklyn through culture, art, activism, and community building. This festival draws from the themes that resonated most deeply during their time together, including migration, roots, family, memory, language, Jewish identity, and spirituality. Through the work of 27 artists, the festival showcases the diversity of thought and creativity shaping contemporary Jewish art in New York City and beyond.
Featured artists:
Exhibition: 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
Performance Evening 1: Eli Berman, Catherine (C. Francis) Fisher, Ira Gamerman, Ben Gassman, Rachel Gita Karp, Florence Nasar, Lindsey Hope Pearlman
Performance Evening 2: Paul Amitai, Talia Bloch, Noah Crandell, Aviv Keshet, Nessa Norich
Family workshop: Eli Berman
Featured Artists
Paul Amitai
Paul Amitai is an artist, musician, and curator who has exhibited and performed internationally. He’s been an artist-in-residence at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Banff Centre, and Harvestworks. Paul was formerly Senior Curator at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and currently leads the sound design agency, Listen, in New York.
Amitai's treats sound like paint or sculpture — an additive and reductive process shaped in real-time, blending studio-based experimentation, live improvisation, and site-specific installations. Since 2021, he's released three albums that reflect this painterly approach, using voice as the sole instrument. With guitar effects pedals as colors and textures, Amitai has explored turning voice into something elastic and uncanny, yet grounded in physical, human presence. These improvisations aim to create immersive sonic paintings and environments that evoke a sacred experience.
In 2025, he received a Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award to develop the vocal performance project, Trope Variations, which uses Torah cantillation as the basis for live improvisation. A set of thirty graphic marks, each representing a different melody, provide the creative prompts for performance. Inspired by Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” and John Cage’s use of the I Ching to introduce chance operations into music, Trope Variations are never performed the same way twice. The melodic motifs are the building blocks of a performance, rearranged, sequenced, and reinterpreted in new ways every time it’s performed.
Extracting the graphics and melodies from their original function brings the vocabulary into a new context, eliciting the past but through a personal, contemporary reinterpretation. The result is a distinctive approach to structured improvisation, where both vocal samples and live vocalizations are layered and processed to create lush, ambient soundscapes. Situated between extended-duration sound performances, loop-based minimalism, and immersive sound baths, Trope Variations is an exploration in redefining how the sacred or sublime might sound.
Amitai's treats sound like paint or sculpture — an additive and reductive process shaped in real-time, blending studio-based experimentation, live improvisation, and site-specific installations. Since 2021, he's released three albums that reflect this painterly approach, using voice as the sole instrument. With guitar effects pedals as colors and textures, Amitai has explored turning voice into something elastic and uncanny, yet grounded in physical, human presence. These improvisations aim to create immersive sonic paintings and environments that evoke a sacred experience.
In 2025, he received a Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award to develop the vocal performance project, Trope Variations, which uses Torah cantillation as the basis for live improvisation. A set of thirty graphic marks, each representing a different melody, provide the creative prompts for performance. Inspired by Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” and John Cage’s use of the I Ching to introduce chance operations into music, Trope Variations are never performed the same way twice. The melodic motifs are the building blocks of a performance, rearranged, sequenced, and reinterpreted in new ways every time it’s performed.
Extracting the graphics and melodies from their original function brings the vocabulary into a new context, eliciting the past but through a personal, contemporary reinterpretation. The result is a distinctive approach to structured improvisation, where both vocal samples and live vocalizations are layered and processed to create lush, ambient soundscapes. Situated between extended-duration sound performances, loop-based minimalism, and immersive sound baths, Trope Variations is an exploration in redefining how the sacred or sublime might sound.
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.
Eli Berman
Eli Berman is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, composer, producer, and sound artist originally from Pittsburgh, PA. Her music weaves together extended vocal techniques and experimental electronics with Ashkenanzi Jewish cantorial prayer, Yiddish and Appalachian ballads, and western classical repertoire for countertenor, baritone, and choir. She builds and performs with custom “vocal feedback pipes”—amplified PVC and steel tubes rigged with animal hides, transducers, and effects pedals that transform her voice and generate resonant acoustic feedback. As a member of Kleztronica, a collective mixing house, techno, klezmer, and Jewish liturgical music, Eli creates club, ambient, and noise music entirely from processed vocal samples. She has performed across North America and Europe at venues such as Ars Nova, National Sawdust, Morgan Library & Museum, Watermill Center, Centro Cultural Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico City, MX), Banff Centre (Alberta, CA), Neues Nationalgalerie (Berlin, DE), Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), Yiddish Summer Weimar (Weimar, DE), and the Monastery of Saint Martin Pinario (Santiago de Compostela, ES). In 2025, Eli received the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence from the University of Maryland for her multimedia collaboration with artists Bonita Oliver and Armond Dorsey. In addition to composing and recording music for albums, film, and video games, Eli regularly performs as a countertenor soloist and chamber vocalist at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, and other congregations throughout New York City.
Talia Bloch
Talia Bloch is the author of the poetry collection Inheritance (Gold Wake Press). Her second manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Competition as well as several other prizes. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2020, a Pleiades Editor’s Prize for Emerging Poets, and for Reading the Body: Poetry & Dance on Recovery, a film coproduced by Bellevue Literary Review and The Paige Fraser Foundation that has won awards internationally. Talia’s work has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska, Monson Arts in Maine, and Yetzirah. Much of her work looks for the line between being a passive observer and an active participant both in one’s private life and in the public arena. Her journalism covering culture and religion, as well as genetics and health, has appeared in outlets such as Aufbau, The Brooklyn Rail, JTA, and The Forward, and she participated in a project with The City newspaper, honoring the lives of those lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. Born and raised in the Bronx, NY, Talia currently lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a BA in comparative literature from Yale University. She has worked as a reporter, editor, translator, teacher, fellowship administrator, and immigrant-petition-advocacy writer. She has also spent time in a community lab and currently teaches poetry classes in the community.
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.
Noah Crandell
Noah Crandell is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance practitioner whose work explores memory, history, and their contemporary afterlives. He has presented work at Dixon Place, TheaterLab, Prelude Festival, and Creative Time HQ, and has been an artist in residence at Holyrad Studio and Otion Front Studio. He received a Tow International Research Grant to perform at the Riga Performance Festival in Latvia, where he conducted field research across Eastern Europe at sites of genocide and memorialization. Crandell is a member of the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do, contributing writing to their zines We Remind You, HIV and Palestine, and What Is an AIDS Worker? He has worked as a facilitator with Perfect City at Trenton HomeWorks and Bard College and is an upcoming resident at the Vashon Artist Residency. He received his BFA in Drama from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and is an
MFA candidate in Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College.
MFA candidate in Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College.
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.
Catherine (C.) Francis Fisher
C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Review, the New England Review, and the Adroit Journal among others. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry Books in 2024. She has been supported by residencies and fellowships from Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Her current project is a book-length poem that tries to reimagine the epic form. Written in a single sentence, this feminist project aims to rid the genre of hero and plot.
She also works as a curator for two event series in NYC: Colloquy, which invites translators for readings and conversations about literary translations, and RINSE: Works in Progress which brings together artists of all disciplines for short performances.
Her current project is a book-length poem that tries to reimagine the epic form. Written in a single sentence, this feminist project aims to rid the genre of hero and plot.
She also works as a curator for two event series in NYC: Colloquy, which invites translators for readings and conversations about literary translations, and RINSE: Works in Progress which brings together artists of all disciplines for short performances.
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.
Ben Gassman
Ben Gassman writes plays and texts for performance. His most recent works are the plays Adult Relationships (2025) and Botte di Ferro (2021), and the installation Between The Bread, which he conceived with Brandon Woolf under the banner of Culinary Theater (2023). Ben's work is interested in density and difference, and fueled by the rhythms of the spoken language of outer borough New York. He is interested in the way the global gets siphoned into the local.
Ira Gamerman
Ira Lawrence Gamerman (He/We) is a writer, actor, and musician based in Brooklyn. (SAG-AFTRA) Screen: David Byrne’s “Everybody Laughs”, The Last OG (TBS) , East New York (CBS). Recent stage acting credits: The Edge Of Nature by Josh Fox (La MaMa), Doomers by Matthew Gasda (Brooklyn Center For Theater Research). Ira’s scriptwriting has been showcased by Kennedy Center, Mortified Live, Chashama, KGB Bar, Radiotopia’s The Truth, House Of Yes, The Flea, Collaboraction (@ Steppenwolf Garage), Australian Broadcast Corporation, Baltimore Playwright’s Festival, Samuel French OOB, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and Chicago New Media Summit as well as many other places around the globe. His play Moving The Eruv is a 2025 Script Competition Semifinalist at Austin Film Festival. Ira makes music with a haunted electric mandolin that was gifted by his estranged grandmother. Listen to AMBNT MNDLN, and Ira Lawrence’s Haunted Mandolin on all streaming services. Awards: New York Innovative Theater Award Nomination for Best Short Play, Best Playwright of Baltimore (City Paper), playwriting grants from Maryland State Arts Council and Chicago Union League. BILLY BITCHASS is published in BEST 10 MINUTE PLAYS OF 2016 by Smith & Kraus. Ira provided dramaturgy for David Finnigan’s Scenes From The Climate Era at The Cell in 2023. Ira’s Freelance Arts Journalism has been published by Antics, High Times, Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, and Howlround. Ira taught playwriting and theater classes at Kingsborough Community College and Ohio University. Ira is cofounder of Misfits For Democracy a progressive political phone-banking group who partnered with PA Stands Up, Sunrise, DSA, Korean American Democratic Committee, NEXTGen, for many electoral victories.
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.
Rachel Gita Karp
Rachel Gita Karp writes and directs performances to change US politics and policy. In particular she focuses on protecting reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, supporting voting and voters, and increasing gender representation in government.
Trained in writing and directing, with backgrounds in theater, history, and activism, Rachel has created political performances in New York through Clubbed Thumb, Ars Nova, Mabou Mines, New Georges, The Drama League, Irondale, Judson Memorial Church, The Wild Project, The Brick, The Flea, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Re/Venue, IRT, Dixon Place, Incubator Arts Project, Anonymous Ensemble, Women Center Stage, and Network of Ensemble Theatres. Regionally, her work has been produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, and Philly Fringe, and she has written and directed productions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chatham University, Columbia University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Rachel has held residencies across the US including at Marble House Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Tofte Lake Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Barn Arts, Monson Arts, Wildacres, and Stove Works. She was a Beatrice Terry Resident Director at The Drama League, a Directing Fellow at Clubbed Thumb, a Resident Artist at Mabou Mines, and a Resident Director at The Flea. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Director Lab and an affiliated artist with New Georges. Rachel has associate and assistant directed productions on Broadway, Off-, and regional. Currently she works as a director at the Center for Artistic Activism, where she helps advocates bring more strategic creativity to their socially-engaged work – and gets endless inspiration to continue her own. BA: Columbia. MFA: Carnegie Mellon.
Trained in writing and directing, with backgrounds in theater, history, and activism, Rachel has created political performances in New York through Clubbed Thumb, Ars Nova, Mabou Mines, New Georges, The Drama League, Irondale, Judson Memorial Church, The Wild Project, The Brick, The Flea, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Re/Venue, IRT, Dixon Place, Incubator Arts Project, Anonymous Ensemble, Women Center Stage, and Network of Ensemble Theatres. Regionally, her work has been produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, and Philly Fringe, and she has written and directed productions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chatham University, Columbia University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Rachel has held residencies across the US including at Marble House Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Tofte Lake Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Barn Arts, Monson Arts, Wildacres, and Stove Works. She was a Beatrice Terry Resident Director at The Drama League, a Directing Fellow at Clubbed Thumb, a Resident Artist at Mabou Mines, and a Resident Director at The Flea. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Director Lab and an affiliated artist with New Georges. Rachel has associate and assistant directed productions on Broadway, Off-, and regional. Currently she works as a director at the Center for Artistic Activism, where she helps advocates bring more strategic creativity to their socially-engaged work – and gets endless inspiration to continue her own. BA: Columbia. MFA: Carnegie Mellon.
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.
Aviv Keshet
Aviv Keshet is a multidisciplinary artist and performer, born in Jerusalem (1995) and currently based in Princeton, NJ. Keshet is a 2022 graduate of the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem.
Keshet's practice integrates bodies, objects, and spaces as components of equal agency, cultivating work that straddles the divide between performance and the plastic arts. Working across media predicated on supposedly clear divides—the moving subject of dance, the silent object of sculpture, and the inert, homogeneous space presumed to hold them—Keshet investigates the body's role as a knowing object and how objects act upon the body. Through embodied philosophies and social constructs, Keshets work channels the relationship between individual and society, seeking transformation through deep understanding.
Recent work includes One Thing (2025) HaMiffal, Jerusalem, Red Blanket and Flatland (2025) Kfar Saba City Gallery, A Man Walked… (2024) Givat Haviva Shared Art Center,
Keshet has completed residencies at HaMiffal (2025), Givat Haviva Shared Art Center (AIR 2024) and Nekudat Katze (2022-2023).
Keshet's practice integrates bodies, objects, and spaces as components of equal agency, cultivating work that straddles the divide between performance and the plastic arts. Working across media predicated on supposedly clear divides—the moving subject of dance, the silent object of sculpture, and the inert, homogeneous space presumed to hold them—Keshet investigates the body's role as a knowing object and how objects act upon the body. Through embodied philosophies and social constructs, Keshets work channels the relationship between individual and society, seeking transformation through deep understanding.
Recent work includes One Thing (2025) HaMiffal, Jerusalem, Red Blanket and Flatland (2025) Kfar Saba City Gallery, A Man Walked… (2024) Givat Haviva Shared Art Center,
Keshet has completed residencies at HaMiffal (2025), Givat Haviva Shared Art Center (AIR 2024) and Nekudat Katze (2022-2023).
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.
Nessa Norich
Nessa Norich is a filmmaker, theater artist, ritual facilitator, and somatic coach.
Nessa's award-winning original theatrical works have toured as far as New Delhi, and have shown at such notable venues as the Edinburgh Fringe, the British Film Institute, and the Getty Villa. In 2019, Nessa made their screen directing debut with the queer episodic fantasy series The Fae. Her first short film, Jelly Bean, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, was a 2022 NYC Women’s Fund recipient and the Official Selection of twenty-two International Film Festivals, including Academy Award-Qualifying Flicker’s Rhode Island, where Nessa received the award for Best Actress. As an actor, Nessa has starred in several feature and short films and guest-starred in HBO’s High Maintenance.
In her work, Nessa reimagines and reinterprets fairytales, myths, and rituals as documentation of ancestral wisdom, preserved to fortify our relationship to the spiritual aspects of our humanity and the natural world. Nessa composes colorful, stylized, satirical narratives for performance and film from found materials and sources, employing a devising methodology in which the performing ensemble collaboratively generates material through research, discussion, and embodied experimentation. Nessa's interest in adaptation is inspired by the traditional Jewish practice of studying biblical texts, which is characterized by linguistic analysis and interpretation - executed in a relational practice of knowledge-formation. Narrative is preserved through its ongoing revision. Nessa’s collaborators are invited to reflect on the themes of these classic stories through their own life experiences, pop culture references, and sensory-scapes. Sources are woven together with archetypal stories, revising them as mirrors for our current times and as maps for future generations.
Nessa trained in physical theater at the Lecoq School in Paris, with David Neumann and Diane Paulus at Barnard. In May, she will graduate from NYU Tisch with a Master’s in Arts Politics.
Nessa's award-winning original theatrical works have toured as far as New Delhi, and have shown at such notable venues as the Edinburgh Fringe, the British Film Institute, and the Getty Villa. In 2019, Nessa made their screen directing debut with the queer episodic fantasy series The Fae. Her first short film, Jelly Bean, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, was a 2022 NYC Women’s Fund recipient and the Official Selection of twenty-two International Film Festivals, including Academy Award-Qualifying Flicker’s Rhode Island, where Nessa received the award for Best Actress. As an actor, Nessa has starred in several feature and short films and guest-starred in HBO’s High Maintenance.
In her work, Nessa reimagines and reinterprets fairytales, myths, and rituals as documentation of ancestral wisdom, preserved to fortify our relationship to the spiritual aspects of our humanity and the natural world. Nessa composes colorful, stylized, satirical narratives for performance and film from found materials and sources, employing a devising methodology in which the performing ensemble collaboratively generates material through research, discussion, and embodied experimentation. Nessa's interest in adaptation is inspired by the traditional Jewish practice of studying biblical texts, which is characterized by linguistic analysis and interpretation - executed in a relational practice of knowledge-formation. Narrative is preserved through its ongoing revision. Nessa’s collaborators are invited to reflect on the themes of these classic stories through their own life experiences, pop culture references, and sensory-scapes. Sources are woven together with archetypal stories, revising them as mirrors for our current times and as maps for future generations.
Nessa trained in physical theater at the Lecoq School in Paris, with David Neumann and Diane Paulus at Barnard. In May, she will graduate from NYU Tisch with a Master’s in Arts Politics.
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.
Lindsey Hope Pearlman
Lindsey Hope Pearlman is a director and playwright specializing in new plays and musicals. Original plays: Lucy (EST/Sloan Commission), Viv is for Vengeance (American Playwriting Foundation Relentless Award Honorable Mention), Cassandra Complex. Broadway: Bandstand (Assistant Director), Leap of Faith (SDC Observer). Selected Off-Broadway: The Art Tour (Theater Row), A Sign of the Times (Book writer, New World Stages), The Shoebox (SheNYC @ The Connelly), The Unrepentant Necrophile (HERE Arts Center), Zodiac Math (Mitu580). Selected Regional: MacGyver the Musical (Co-book writer, Stages, Houston TX), SuperYou (Associate Director, Skylight Music Theater, Milwaukee WI), The Rocky Horror Show Live! (The Strand Theater, Rockland ME). She received a NYSCA commission and a Venturous Theatre Fund grant for her new musical ROAR!, currently in development. Drama League NY Directing Fellow. Member, Bread Arts Collective. Graduate of London International School of Performing Arts, Hamilton College. Adjunct Professor, Pace University.
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.
Our Partners
JOIN US!
bottom of page