Mitra Abbaspour is Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Princeton University Art Museum and a member of the University faculty. Prior to Princeton, she served as an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and an Assistant Curator at the California Museum of Photography, in addition to having served as a guest curator for a number of exhibitions at various institutions.

At Princeton, she has curated or co-curated at the Museum include Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2019), Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (2018), Making History Visible: Of American Myths and National Heroes (2017).

At MoMA, she led the curatorial branch of an interdisciplinary research initiative that resulted in the print and digital publications Object : Photo: Modern Photographs 1909-1945. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists in this field, most recently contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, and Shirin Neshat and has also taught courses both in her specialization, the modern and contemporary Middle East and, general area specializations—Islamic art, modern art, and the history of photography—at The Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College.

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

www.davidadika.com

www.instagram.com/dadika/

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B. Jerusalem 1971, 

Video artist, Head of Video studies at the The Screen Based Arts Department at The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. MFA graduate at Hunter college NYC. She received The Gesher Foundation award (2008), The Creative Encouragement Award of the Israel Ministry of Culture & Sport (2008), The Young Artist Award of the Israel Ministry of Culture & Sport (2004) The America – Israel  Cultural Foundation (AICF) Scholarship Award for Artistic Achievement (1998-2002). Balaban has participated in exhibitions both in Israel and abroad, amongst them solo exhibitions at The Herzliya Museum of Art, The Haifa Museum of Art, Appendix Gallery, Warsaw, Tavi Art gallery, Tel Aviv and group exhibitions in Artists space, NYC, Queens Museum, NYC, Video Zone, Herzliya Museum, Art Chicago, Mediation Biennale, Poznan, Meet Factory, Prague, Tarun centre for contemporary Art, poland, NordArt, Germany. The Israel museum, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for contemporary art, the Tel Aviv museum of Art, ZAZ10TS Gallery NYC. 

Diverse curatorial projects in the public sphere: Operation, Contemporary Art at the Supermarket, featuring 22 artists. Talita-Kumi - video installation in the windows of a central store, video program projections at the abandoned "Eden" cinema in central jerusalem.

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Roy Brand is a philosopher and a curator working in the areas of modern philosophy and contemporary aesthetics. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press, New York and translated into Korean, Hebrew and Persian. His book Art and the Form of Life is forthcoming by Palgrave Macmillan. He currently heads Parterre Institute for Philosophy and Art in Tel Aviv. 

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Lyat Friedman has completed undergraduate studies at Ben Gurion University in behavioral sciences and received a master’s degree from New York University, in philosophy.
She has obtained a PhD, in philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago, where she wrote a dissertation on Plato’s dialogues. Before returning to Israel, she participated in Jacques Derrida’s seminar at University of California, Irvine, for four years. Upon her return, she taught for five years at the Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies Programs, Tel Aviv University and for ten years, was a faculty member at the Philosophy Department and Gender Studies Program, Bar Ilan University. In the last eight years, she serves as chair of the M.A. Program in Policy and Theory of the Arts, Bezalel Academy.
She specializes in Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalytic Theory, Gender Studies, Art Theory and Critical Thinking. Her book, In the Footsteps of Psychoanalysis was published in 2013, in Hebrew. She has published many articles in both Hebrew and English; she is a member of the Continental Philosophy Seminar; together with Galit Wellner, Phd, she has edited the second issue of Notebooks in Continental Philosophy (2020). Her next book, Transformative Criticism, is in process.

Michal Helfman (b. 1973) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Tel Aviv.

Helfman;s works are based on a historical and actual research on personas and organizations who worked under political conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability.

The intertwining of facts and fiction creates the ground on which Helfman’s installations, video works and performances evolve.

Helfman has had solo-shows in, among others:  KW Berlin, The Felix Nussbaum Haus Osnabruck the Israel Museum and in Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Tel-Aviv CCA.

She has exhibited in international exhibitions including the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the 50th Venice Biennial, as well as the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, NBK Berlin, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Tale of a Tub Rotterdam among others.

 Helfman is a recipient of the Anselm Kiefer Award of the Wolf Foundation and 2009 ministry of culture award and for young artists and 2020 ministry of culture awardand for independent artists.

 Since 2003 she is a senior faculty member at the BFA and MFA programs of Bezalel.

Irit Hemmo, born 1961, is a Tel Aviv based artist and Senior Lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at Bezalel. Hemmo’s work varies between different mediums and techniques. In the past four years she has worked on an ongoing project - a body of paintings made with dust. For this project, she built a room where she creates dust storms via manipulated vacuum cleaners, resulting in layers of dust (and time) upon carefully placed stencils. In her latest solo show, Hemmo exhibited the dust-room as an automated, time based installation, as well as a projected video. Upon the room's floor, Hemmo created scale sized monuments and objects, which resembled the modern city's architecture. The manipulated vacuum cleaners created dust storms periodically, covering and revealing throughout the show, as the dust piled up over the floor's landscape to create an illusion of a catastrophe, a post-apocalyptic environment where once there was life. Irit has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the globe including: The Istanbul Biennale; New York; London; Munich; Koln; Hamburg; Vienna; Valencia; Basel, among many other venues. Her works are part of the collections of both Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as various institutional and private collections.

Jossef Krispel is an artist, painter, and the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, where he has served as a senior lecturer since 2006. He holds both Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) and Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) degrees from Bezalel. In his work, Krispel raises questions about the definition and the position of a painting in relation to the painted surface, and suggests seeing it as a mask, a screen, a shell, or a coating. He has been featured in many solo exhibitions in Israel and abroad, including at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Palazzo Riccardo Medici in Florence, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the Haifa Museum of Art, to name just a few. He has won numerous awards; among them the 2008 Rappaport Young Artist Prize, the 2012 Ministry of Culture Award, and the 2006 Young Artist Award. His paintings are found in many collections, including that of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), and private collections in Israel and abroad. He lives and works in Jerusalem.

Daniel Meir (b. 1972, in Haifa Israel) is a Tel Aviv based sound designer and sound artist, specializing in sound design and original music for video art, documentaries, film, and theater.

He works with critically acclaimed video artists, film makers, and musicians from around the world. Notably, he has collaborated on works that have been featured in the Venice Biennale, among Academy Awards nominated films, and a Cannes Festival winning film. 

His work can be heard daily in cinemas, museums and exhibitions worldwide.

Daniel teaches sound art and sound design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.

In addition, He is the co-founder and director of Halas Radio, an experimental internet radio station sponsored by The Israeli Center for Digital Art.

For CV and Credit list see danielmeir.com

Nirith Nelson, curator and lecturer, resides in Israel. Has earned her BA and MA from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in Art History.
Since 1998 on, she is a faculty member at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, teaching curatorial practices and contemporary art. In 2019 was appointed to be head of the Curatorial Studies in the frame of the Policy & Theory of the Arts Masters Program at Bezalel. 

Worked at the Israel Museum as a curator and lecturer (for 9 years) headed the JCVA residency (http://jcva.org.prv05.dodihosting.com) as its artistic director (for 14 yrs), was the art adviser to the Jerusalem Foundation (for 14yrs) and worked in several other institutions. 

In those frames as well as an independent curator, curated over forty exhibitions both in contemporary art and design, which were shown in major venues in Israel and abroad.

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Sara Reisman is Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design in New York City. A curator, educator, and writer, Reisman was most recently the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), and prior to that held roles as Director of the Percent for Art program at the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2009). Reisman has curated exhibitions locally and internationally for venues including the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Queens Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Cooper Union School of Art, the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Momenta Art, and Smack Mellon, among other venues. She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, the Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has also taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and, since 2016, at the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program. She received her BA from the University of Chicago, participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program as a 2002-2003 Helena Rubinstein Fellow, and subsequently served as the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2004-2005), and the Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum (2005-2006).

Vanina Saracino is a curator, writer, and lecturer. Her work focuses on man-made environmental breakdown, climate justice, and more-than-human minds, with an emphasis on lens-based and time-based art practices. She is currently co-curating (with Daniela Arriado) the upcoming Screen City Biennial, titled Other Minds (Oslo, 2022) and teaching the seminar ‘More-than-human perspectives and tentacular thinking’ with Prof. Nina Fischer at the department of Art and Media, Universität der Künste (UdK, Berlin) and at MFA Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv). In 2019, she co-curated the Screen City Biennial, Ecologies – Lost, Found and Continued (Stavanger, Norway) and edited the SCB Journal, Vol.2. She is the co-founder of OLHO, a project about contemporary art and cinema initiated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2015–2018). As an independent curator, she has collaborated with Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice), TBA21–Academy, Cinemateca Brasileira (São Paulo), Cinemateca do MAM (Rio de Janeiro), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), The EYE Film Institute (Amsterdam), among others. Saracino has realized residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios (Dublin, 2019), CPR – Curatorial Program for Research (Reykjavik, Tórshavn, Tromsø, Boden, Luleå, Hyrynsalmi, Helsinki, 2018), GENERATOR, 40m cube/EESAB (Rennes, 2018), and was awarded research visiting grants by ProHelvetia (Switzerland, 2018), Goethe-Institut (NYC, 2018), The Danish Art Foundation (Copenhagen, 2018 and 2017) and Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki and Turku, 2019), among others.

Yehudit Sasportas is a senior professor at the department of Fine Art in the BFA and MFA Programs since 94. She works simultaneously in Berlin and Tel Aviv, with a high level of international professional commitment and involvement.

Her work is focused on site-specific installations, which include sculptures, drawings, video and sound works, and call for an intense and overwhelming sensory experience. Her installations have gone through a process of adapting and responding to the architecture of various museum spaces while forming into artworks that present a new way of reading architecture itself, as well as the wider cultural context it was created in. Her sculptural installations deal with a fascinating correspondence taking place between subconscious materials, unspoken and unseen, and the way these layers of information activate conscious areas across the surface. 

Sasportas represented Israel in the 2007 Venice Biennial, and has presented more than 17 international solo exhibitions during the last decade, in venues such as: The Archeology of The Unseen, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Wilhelmshaven. Germany, 2020. RIFTS OF ABSENCE, Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, Germany, 2017. HAMAKOM, GL STRAND Kunsthalle, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016. Seven Winters, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 2013. HASIPUR – The Story, Herbert Gerisch Stiftung, Neuemunster, Germany, 2010. The Clearing of the Unseen, DA2 Domus Atrium, Salamanca, Spain, 2009. The Laboratory, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2008. By the River, Matrix 200, the Berkley Museum of Art, San Francisco, USA, 2002. The Carpenter and the Seamstress II, Deitch Projects, New York, USA, 2001.

Gil Marco Shani is a painter and installation artist. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, 1968. BA (1994) in Art from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Art Studies (1994) Slade School, London. Faculty member and senior lecturer in the Department of Art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Shani has won many awards: the Gottesdiener Foundation Award for a Young Israeli Artist (2008) and the Sandberg Award for Israeli Art for 2018. His paintings are in the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum and others. In 1994, he participated in the exhibition "Transit" as part of "Art Focus" and in 1997, he participated in "Sederni Noy" within the "Saf" exhibition at the Israel Museum, curated by Sarit Shapira in 1999. In 2001 Shani completed "Safari" installation at the "Helena" exhibition at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The ambitious installation "Buses" at the Israel Museum 2018, is one of the highlights of Shani's achievements in his consistent body of work.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles believes art creates freedom and asks whether we can design modes of survival—for a thriving planet, not an entropic one—that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice.

Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum; Guggenheim Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago (promised gift); Migros Museum, Zurich; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum, Hartford; Smith College Museum, Northampton; and the Jewish Museum, New York City.  She is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York.

She exhibits and lectures internationally and has received honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design, the Maine College of Art, and in May, 2019, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she gave the Commencement Address.  

Two books have recently been published about her work:  MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES:  MAINTENANCE ART, Prestel, 2016 and SEVEN WORK BALLETS, Sternberg, 2015.

Sharon Yaari, photographer, artist, and photography and art lecturer.

Ya’ari graduated from the photography department of Bezalel Academy of Art and design, Jerusalem, in 1994 and received MPhil, Faculty of Art, Design and Technology, University of Derby, England in 2002.
Ya'ari's works focus on ordinary objects and routine life throughout the country while inducing from them a range of complex socio-political sensitive insights.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been shown at Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany; Haus Esters, Kunstmuseen Krefeld Germany; The National Gallery Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; Galerie Martin Janda Vienna; Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv; Lisson Gallery, London; Lombard Freid Fine Arts, New York; Andrea Meislin Gallery New York; Herzliya Art Museum; Select group shows at The Israel Museum Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Dom Museum Wien; Jewish Museum New York, National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi, India, Kunst Haus Austria, Camera-Austria, Graz, Austria; Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, Germany; Ashdod art Museum; CCA Tel Aviv; Haifa Museum of Art.

Yaari awarded the EMET Prize, Culture and Art: Photography (2018); The Constantiner Photography Award, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2010); Creative Encouragement Award, Israel ministry of cultural & sport (2009); The Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2005); The Janet & George M. Jaffin Award, America–Israel Cultural Foundation (2004); Minister of Education and Sport Prize for Artists in the Field of Plastic Arts (2000); Gerard Levi Price, Young Photographer’s Price, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2009);

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Nevet Yitzhak (b. 1975, Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv) is a graduate of the Naggar School of Photography, Media and New Music (2003); and the Bezalel Program for Advanced Studies in Art (2007). Her work has been shown at the 6th Asian Biennial, Taiwan; Koffler Center of the Arts, Toronto; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; SMBA, Amsterdam; Kuandu Museum, Taipei; the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem; Herzlyia Museum of Contemporary Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Circle 1, Berlin; 68 Square Meters, Copenhagen; Edel Assanti Gallery, London; TSR, Miami; the 5th Mediations Biennale, Poznan; SIP Institute for Photography, Tel Aviv; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; Huashan Culture Park, Taipei and CCA, Tel- Aviv.

Yitzhak has been awarded the Visual Art Award, Israeli Ministry of Culture & Sport (2017); The Landau Fund Prize for Arts and Sciences (2014); Beatrice S. Kolliner Award for a Young Israeli Artist (Israel Museum, 2014); Shmuel Givon Prize (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2012); Creative Encouragement Award (Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, 2012)Minister of Culture award; and the Creative Encouragement Award.

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