Department of Photography
המחלקה לצילום
قسم التصوير الفوتوغرافي
David Adika is a photographer, artist, and Head of the Photography Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem. A senior lecturer in the Department of Photography since 1999, he holds bachelor’s (BFA) and master’s (MFA) degrees from Bezalel.
David Adika’s work focuses on the visual and cultural facets of the local Middle Eastern space as a microcosm that reflects his social and family identity. His photographic corpus contains representations of various still life and portraits, blurring the boundaries between abstract conceptual language and lavish visual accuracy. Adika’s visual research explores intimate yet universal biographies, while the photographs unfold familiar and unfamiliar aspects of everyday life and highlight questions of taste and social status.
Adika has had many solo exhibitions in Israeli and international venues, among them Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Art Museum in Riga, Latvia, Bologna MUSEI, Casa Morandi, Italy, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv. He has won many awards, including the Minister and the Emerging Artist Prizes from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the Jack Nailor Award for Photography. His photographs are included in many collections, such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Casa Morandi in Italy, the Knesset and private collections in Israel and abroad.
He lives in Jaffa and works in Jerusalem
Ory Bartal is the former head of the Department of Visual and Material Culture in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem. Since 2024 Bartal is the head of the Master's degree program in Industrial Design at Bezalel.
Bartal is a Japanologist focusing on contemporary Japanese design including industrial and fashion design as well as manga and visual communication. Bartal completed his M.B.A. in the Department of International Business Administration at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo in a joint project with the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA He then studied advanced studies toward M.Des. in the Industrial Design department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. He completed his Ph.D. at the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Tel Aviv, specializing in contemporary visual culture. His book “Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Persuasion and the Tokyo Art Directors Club” was published in 2015. The book deals with Japanese advertising, the connection between aesthetics and contemporary consumer culture and the blur boundaries between branding and art. His second book “Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury and the Avant-Garde” published in 2020. This book presents the post-war designers that made decisions and created artifacts that radically altered and reshaped the course of Japanese design history. The book shows how their avant-garde design involves an encounter between postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic rules operating as a critical sociopolitical agent.
Hilla Ben Ari is a visual artist based in Tel Aviv. Her work spans a variety of media such as video, installation, sculpture, and print. The female body as a crossroads of political, social and cultural contexts is at the core of her multidisciplinary projects that fuse visual art, dance, and theatre.
Ben Ari held a solo exhibition at various art venues including the Libby Gallery, Florida; the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Art, Ein Harod. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at various museums and galleries, among them: the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Orange County Museum of Art, California; the MAXXI Museum, Rome; and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts as part of the 2009 Asian Art Biennial.
Among her prizes: The Prize for an Established Video Artist - the Israeli Ministry of Culture (2016), the Pins Prize - The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016), The Premio Combat Prize, Italy (2016), The Kolb Prize – Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2014).
Her works are in the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Bundestag, Berlin.
Architect, Graduate of the Architecture department in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (2014).During her studies, Ayelet participated in a spontaneous architecture project in India (SABA 2011). A collaborative project with the Department of Architecture of CEPT University, Ahmedabad. The project involved planning and building classrooms made of local materials for farmers and their children in the rural area of the Halvad desert.
In 2012, Ayelet participated in the student exchange program in FAUP, the Department of Architecture in Porto University, Portugal. During this program Ayelet was inspired by the Portuguese public domain architecture which aspires to integrate the design into the environment and society in which it resides.
Ayelet won the ‘Final Project Encouragement’ scholarship from the Schneidinger Foundation. In the project “Waiting for the next disaster”, Ayelet examined the idea of urban renewal and formulated a progressive strategy of public housing revival in Israel, where the underlining drive for renewal is an imminent disaster.
Since 2014 Ayelet has been a lecturer at the orthodox extension ‘Oman’ and the pre-studies department at Bezalel. In 2015 Ayelet joined ‘Shlomo Aharonson Architects’ office for landscape architecture and urban planning and in 2018 she founded BAAB company for architecture and interior design together with arch.Itai Bechor.
