President's Message
The name of Bezalel is synonymous with more than 100 years of Israeli art, years of innovation and quality. Bezalel, established in 1906 by artist Boris Schatz, as the “Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts,” is currently the “Bezalel academy of arts and design Jerusalem”, Israel’s leading academy of art and design, and one of the most prestigious in the world. Bezalel’s unique strength lies in its ability to respond swiftly to cultural changes, as demonstrated by the numerous artistic breakthroughs it has been responsible for. Bezalel takes enormous pride in its many generations of graduates – artists, designers and architects at the cutting edge of their fields in Israel and all over the globe. The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is first and foremost a large array of talented and inspired artists. Both the faculty and the student body are driven by a passion to create and by their meticulous attention to quality and excellence. These two cornerstones have placed Bezalel at the epicenter of Israel’s cultural discourse and artistic scene, making it instrumental in shaping and enriching the country’s cultural identity.
Bezalel has a broad and multifaceted scope of professional and artistic activities, ranging from crafts, such as the design of ceramics, glass, accessories and jewelry, which preserve ancient techniques together with state of the art techniques, and maintain workshops unparalleled anywhere else in the country; to fine art, sculpture and photography, fields that have seen many changes in the past decades; and state-of-the-art digital technology used in industrial design, animation, video art and visual communications.
Bezalel’s students of today will be tomorrow’s generation of artists, designers and architects, leaders in their fields in Israel and the world. To make this happen, we have to prepare them for a life of quality and excellence. The students are expected to exhibit professional discipline and an ability to pursue in-depth study in their specialty field, alongside curiosity and the desire to gain a well-rounded education, broad horizons and openness to the new and different. Our students receive a practical education at the highest level in addition to a broad-based intellectual foundation in arts and design, history, literature and philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and the fundamentals of scientific and technological thought. Bezalel boasts an outstanding teaching faculty as well as a wide variety of facilities. The complete freedom of choice and creativity experienced by the students ensures that by the end of their studies they will be able to meet all the challenges posed by the global culture of the twenty-first century to blaze their own unique and individual trails in the magical and demanding fields of art, architecture and design.
Professor Arnon Zuckerman
President, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design