As an immigrant who became a mother far from her home country, I am interested in moments of rupture in communication, in personal and national histories, and in the systems that shape individual and collective identities. My oldest son and I learn each other's language every day: he acquires new words in Hebrew, even though it was his first language, while I increasingly speak with him in English, the language that has defined my scholarly and curatorial work over the last decade. I am interested in the possibility of moving between cultures and attempting to feel at home, as well as the conflicts that such movement can produce. I am inspired by change and its complexities, and intrigued by the transitions and shifts of people, objects, and cultures within the exhibition space. My work considers the tensions that arise from the need to adapt to new surroundings and modes of communication, and our enduring relationships to the physical and conceptual lands of origin that continue to shape our subjectivities.

I explored these issues in a number of exhibitions and projects organized internationally. In 2026, the exhibition Reservoir: Photography, Loneliness and Well-Being, which culminated an incubation period of nine months and included nearly 40 new bodies of work by invited artists, shaped a space where people of diverse backgrounds, ages, perspectives and personal histories can feel seen, offering a creative antidote for loneliness. The project was supported by the Angeles Art Fund and was featured in the L.A. Times. The exhibition catalog, published by Workshop Arts and designed by Caleb Cain Marcus, was recognized by the Society of Typographic Arts.

My work also considered intergenerational influences, and how collective traumas might be inherited and surface in creative practice. The exhibition Glowing Earth: A Century of Photography, Immigration, and Resilience in Little Tokyo featured works by photographers who shaped a creative community in the neighborhood during the first decades of the twentieth century, whose impact still resonates in works by contemporary artists. The exhibition included a public art installation by Mike Saijo, based on found glass negatives by Chikashi Tanaka, restored and scanned in collaboration with Yvette Marthell, a project that explored the connection between the Japanese and Mexican communities in LA by Emilene Orozco, winner of the 2025 Aline Smithson Next Generation Award, and a site-specific installation and workshop by Flora Kao, alongside historical images by Toyo Miyatake and Fuji Studio.

In 2016, the international group exhibition I conceived and curated, Dead Lands: Karkaot Mawat, was named winner of the NurtureArt Curatorial Open Call, and was supported by Artis. The exhibition included works by emerging artists who grapple with the lands that have defined or excluded their identity, among them Assaf Evron, Dor Guez, Josh T. Franco, Metehan Ozcan, Alona Rodeh and Yaron Lapid.

As the Chief Curator and Senior Director of Arts and Culture of the American Jewish University, where I also served as the Director of the Institute for Jewish Creativity and the Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education between 2016-2019, I curated exhibitions that offered critical perspectives of collective narratives, and personal reckoning with personal and national identities. Jenny Yurshansky’s solo project, A Legacy of Loss: There Were No Roses There included site-specific installations that trace what is left in a place that expelled and rejected individuals and communities, and included a project created with high-school students in special workshops, alongside community events. The exhibition was also featured by the L.A. Times and Hyperallergic.

The Distance Between the Grooves in My Fingerprint by Christy Roberts Berkowitz (2018), in which the artist considered the body as an embodied archive of inherited violence, by exploring her family history - her mother’s family of Russian refugees, and her father’s ancestral relations to the Mayflower; the dual exhibition This is Not Halfway by Israeli L.A. based artists Gal Amiram and Shasha Dothan (2017), in which they examined the impact of their new home on their creative perspective; and Broken Cisterns by Eliyahu Fatal (Eli Petel), one of Israel’s leading artists (2018, co-curated with Leah Abir). This was his first solo exhibition in nine years, and the first in The US, and the first time he had shown work under his original family name, Fatal, which was changed to Petel by Israeli authorities following their immigration. Considering his Mizrahi roots and connection to Jewish tradition, Fatal (Petel) reflected the transportation of objects and bodies and the identity formations and cultural shifts that result.

I am also interested in the possibility of disrupting the cannon of modern art, by introducing stories and narratives of and by artists that were disregarded or marginalized by Western perceptions. This involves introducing creative pursuits by Israeli artists to American audiences, and re-contextualizing their work by thinking about shared influences, motivations and creative preoccupations. This interest was at the core of the exhibition Launch Sites L.A.: Ezra Orion Revisited, co-curated with Udi Edelman (Center for Digital Art, Israel) and supported by Artis. Orion, who passed away in 2015, was considered an influential yet forgotten sculptor, whose monumental work can be found across Israel’s public spaces. In this exhibition, we regarded his work in relation to Land Art, and examined his collaborations with NASA, his sculptural journeys to Katmandu, and the origins of Orion’s unique view of the world as tectonic sculpture. The space also included a VR station, allowing visitors to experience his grandiose global installations. At AJU’s Brandeis-Bardin campus (Simi Valley), local artist Dan Levenson created a site-specific installation inspired by Orion’s viewpoint at House of the Book, an iconic brutalist venue.  

Art is essential, is communication, is expression of our understanding of the world and our position in it. It is created from the raw materials of our shared existence. The creative act allows to reflect one another, discuss painful realities, reveal undisclosed narratives, and find what lies in the in-between of our collective engagement. Mentoring artists, working with them to find their voice and reverberate it within the work, I hope to create expansive spaces for public engagement and discussion. In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI) I served as a curator-mentor for the Liverpool Biennial for three years, and for the Visiting Curators Series in New Mexico. In these programs, I was fortunate to be invited to mentor artists, expose their work to different audiences, and think with them about their potential targets and goals. In the framework of the Institute for Jewish Creativity, I spearhead annual programs designed to support Jewish artists based in L.A. and create a network of collaborators. There is always much more work to be done.