The Artists

Hannan Abu-Hussein

Hannan Abu-Hussein is an artist and educator, born in Umm al-Fahm and lives in Jerusalem. Her central focus of interest over the last 20 years has been violence against women. Abu-Hussein has won numerous awards including the 2014 Ministry of Culture and Sport Prize for Plastic Art, and the Becky Dekel Prize from the Association for Women’s Art and Gender Research in Israel, 2019.

Fatma Abu-Roumi

Fatma Abu Roumi was born in Tamra. Her paintings present a critical examination of Arab society.

Raida Adon

Raida Adon was born in Akko and is a graduate of the Department of Art and Design at Bezalel, Jerusalem where she lectures today. Her works address issues of home, displacement, wanderings, and belonging. Adon’s works have been displayed in numerous museums and recently in a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Andi Arnovitz

Andi Arnovitz was born and raised in the United States and immigrated to Israel in 1999. Her work has been shown in Europe, Israel, Canada, China, the USA, and Eastern Europe and is part of many collections including the US Library of Congress, The Israel National Library, The Smithsonian Museum, and others.

Itzik Badash

Itzik Badash was born in Netanya to parents of Libyan origin. His works in the fields of photography, video, and installation art examine historical representations related to the significant elements of his identity. Prominent subjects of his work include family, orientalism, and the heritage of Jewish culture in Muslim countries. Badash’s works have been displayed at solo and group exhibitions in Israel and France and have earned him several awards and grants.

Nechama Golan

Nechama Golan is a multi-disciplinary artist and one of the best-known female Orthodox Jewish artists in Israel. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums both in Israel and worldwide. Her works are studied among others in Israeli high-school art studies.

Doris Hakim

Doris Hakim was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian father and a Greek mother. Hakim left Israel and moved to Greece at the age of 20. She studied first Theology and after a few years, Fine Arts. After moving to Spain, she continued with an MA degree and is now doing her PhD.

Shula Keshet

Shula Keshet is an Israeli social and political activist and entrepreneur, Sephardi feminist, artist, curator, and publisher. She is one of the founders of the “Ahoti (My sister) – for Women in Israel” movement, and its CEO since 2005. Keshet’s artwork focuses on her identity as a feminist-Sephardi artist, and as a curator and producer she connects women from Arabic background (Jews, Muslims, and Christians) and reveals their stories.

Yara Kassem Mahajena

Yara Kassem Mahajena is a Palestinian artist born and raised in a small village called Muawiya in northern Israel. Yara’s maternal and paternal families were expelled from their hometowns in 1948. Her art deals with traumas (psychological, cultural, and social).

Ruth Schreiber

Ruth Schreiber was born in London and lives and works in Jerusalem. Schreiber is a multidisciplinary artist who delves into and addresses a variety of aspects such as the circle of life, aging, gender questions, birth and death, faith, heritage, and memory. Schreiber has exhibited her works throughout Israel, Europe, and America.

Yael Serlin

Yael Serlin lives and creates in Jerusalem. Serlin is a multidisciplinary artist. She holds a master’s degree from HaMidrasha – The Beit Berl Faculty of the Arts, a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Emunah Art Academy where she currently serves as Director. Serlin has participated in many group exhibitions and her works can be found in private collections both in Israel and overseas.

Dafna Shalom

Dafna Shalom studied at the International Center for Photography in New York and graduated from Hunter College of Art. Her works are displayed in private and public collections worldwide. Shalom’s works, that are both conceptual and emotional, raise questions about otherness, corporal fragility, and identity.

Amira Ziyan

Amira Ziyan is a photographer who lives in Yarka – a Druze village in the Western Galilee. In her work, she addresses a range of subjects related to social-cultural identity and to the issue of women in the society in which she lives. She completed her studies BA and MA studies with honors and has won awards including the Szpilman Photography Award.

The Curators

Dr. David Sperber, the head of the Curatorial Studies Program at the Schechter Institutes in Jerusalem, is a curator, art scholar, and critic of contemporary art. He specializes in contemporary Jewish art and art created in Israel, and in the relations between art and religion. Until recently, he served as a postdoctoral associate at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University where he also taught in the Art History Department. Dr. Sperber is currently a research fellow at the David Hartman Center for Intellectual Leadership at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and a member of the HUC-JIR Israel Rabbinical Program in Jerusalem. In 2012, he curated the international exhibition ‘Matronita: Jewish Feminist Art’ at the Mishkan Le’Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod in Israel. His book ‘Devoted Resistance: Jewish Feminist Art in the US and Israel’ will be published by the Hebrew University Magnes Press.

Nurit Jacobs-Yinon, the owner of ‘Aluma Films’, is an artist and curator, film director and producer, and co-founder of the Women in Film and Television-Israel Forum. The trilogy of exhibitions she created ‘Inclusion and Exclusion’ – ‘A Tale of a Woman and a Robe’ (2013), ‘Mamzerim: Labeled and Erased’ (2017), and ‘Hebrew Suffragists: 100 Years’ (2019) – is an activist-artistic quest that included exhibitions, films, books, and social activity. Her films have been shown at numerous festivals and screenings in Israel and worldwide and won many awards. Her film ‘Nazareth Cinema Lady’ won Best Film Award at the 2016 Epos Film Festival, her film ‘Covenant-Brit’ won Best Documentary Award at the Religious Film Festival in Trento, Italy in 2007, and the film ‘A Tale of a Woman and a Robe’ was awarded the Best Free Style Award of the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum in 2013.