SHORT BIO:
Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming. Her upcoming book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement is in press with Routledge Publishers, and was named recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies. Rotem is a lecturer at USC Roski School of Art and Design Critical Studies Department, and teaches seminars about photo-theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She mentors artists worldwide and contributes regularly to magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. Her writings about contemporary art and image-based media, as well as Jewish and Israeli art, were published in Artforum.com, Photographies, Jewish Currents, Tablet and Forward, among other outlets.
SELECTED PRESS:
Gabriel Chazan, review of Rotem Rozental’s “Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement”
Tracy L. Chandler, Lenscratch, Aline Smithson: The Ephemeral Archive
Matt Stromnerg, Hyperallergic, What’s Left After Exile?
L.A. Times, The Newest, Coolest L.A. and O.C. Museum Shows to See In April
Deborah Vankin, L.A. Times, What Does It Mean to Be a Refugee?
Matt Stromberg, Hyperallergic, In Malibu, a Large Hole Is Being Dug to Contain Your Grief
Genie Davis, Art and Cake, Christy Roberts Berkowitz at AJU
Ben Ratskoff, L.A. Review of Books, A Reluctant Bricolage of the Sublime and the Popular: Eliyahu Fatal’s “Broken Cisterns”
Avishay Artsy, Jewish Journal Exhibition Brings Israel’s Intergalactic Sculptor Down to Earth
LONG BIO:
A photo-historian, curator and writer residing in Los Angeles with her family, Rotem Rozental empowers and mentors artists worldwide. Her work with creatives is driven by her scholarly research and writings about cultural technologies, institutional archives and civic identities. Rotem was named Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography in February 2022.
Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and the Director of The Institute for Jewish Creativity. You can read about these projects here, here and here. At AJU, Rotem built a network of Jewish artists, organized solo and group exhibitions for local and international Jewish artists, mentored artists at all stages of their career, built a cohesive portfolio for visual and performing artists, including a vibrant program for fine art studies, and had a key role in programming and implementing over 300 virtual events during COVID, which had over 100,000 registrations worldwide.
Rotem is faculty member at the Critical Studies Department at USC Roski School of Art and Design and at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches seminars about photo-theory, archives and visual culture. You can find all her classes here.
Her book, Pre State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement, is forthcoming with Routledge Publishing. The book was named recipient of the Jordan Schintzer First Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies in 2021. In 2019, she completed her Dissertation research under the guidance of Prof. John Tagg at the Art History Department of Binghamton University. Rotem also served as the Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Research Fellow in Jewish Culture at the Center for Jewish History. Her academic research has inspired various projects, among them the exhibition Dead Lands: Karkaot Mawat, winner of the NurtureART curatorial call (April-May 2016), and the essay, “Under Dor Guez’s Bed: Scenes from the Christian Palestinian Archive,” published in Photographies 9.1 (Spring 2016). Rotem is an alumni and network member of Independent Curators International. In collaboration with the ICI, she served as Curator Mentor for the Liverpool Biennial’s Associate Artists Program.
Traversing the domains of technology, media and art, Rotem has been working as a consultant, editor, writer and organizer for international publications, as well as cultural non-profits and organizations. These investigations led her to serve as the Online Editorial Director of The Shpilman Institute for Photography, and the Jerusalem Season of Culture, among other ventures. Her writings and scholarly texts appeared in publications such as Artforum.com, Philosophy of Photography Tablet.com and The Forward.
International curatorial projects include Launch Sites L.A.: Ezra Orion Revisited (in collaboration with the Israeli Center for Digital Art, L.A., 2017), Broken Cisterns: Eliyahu Fatal (Eli Petel) (co-curated with Leah Abir, L.A., 2018), We – Festi-Conference for Creative Collectives (2012-2013, Jerusalem), Three Cities Against the Wall (New York, Ramallah and Tel Aviv, 2005), and the collaborative ongoing archival project Outlet: The Archive of the Israeli Trade Center (Israel/Upstate NY), in which she and her partner, Roy Regev, documented commercial spaces that defined financial and social engagement in Israel’s peripheral towns. The observations obtained for the archive by various media were shown publicly for the first time in the exhibition Outlet: Part I, shown at the Station923 Gallery in Ithaca (NY, 2014). More recently, she curated the virtual exhibitions The Orientalist (2022) and Dana Arieli: The Zionist Phantom (2021), organized by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.