Rudy Gerson (b. 1993, New York City; raised in Las Vegas, NV) is an artist and educator working in the mediums of film, sculpture, and performance to explore forms that flutter between inheritance and invention. Working through an obliquely jewish sensibility, his practice attends to questions of devotion, the poetics of passing, and the limits of knowability, probing how past forms can carry both the weight of capture and the possibility of freedom. He is currently completing a 16mm film that follows a coffin across American landscapes, drawn from the Talmudic story of ben Zakkai's escape to Yavneh. He holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches undergraduates fine art.
Rachel Betesh is a nurse, mother, and poet of Arab-Jewish descent. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Bennington Review, Pleiades, Wildness, and Consequence: A Journal of Global Conflict. She is a 2025 Poetry Grant recipient from The Barbara Deming Fund, to support the completion of a debut collection, "The Beginning Is Never A Homeland.” Writing from the perspective that liberation for Palestine is a moral imperative - and understanding each poem as a tool for world-building – Rachel’s current work reckons with her own ancestral heritage, and imagines a series of free and possible futures.
Canto V. Engelhard is an artist, writer and researcher from Lima. They collaborate in sound healing, experimental and ceremonial music projects and have exhibited sound installations in Xapiri Ground in Cusco, SVA Flatiron Gallery in New York, the Museo de Arte de Lima, RGR Gallery in Mexico City, and did the sound design for the Peruvian Pavillion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. They have a PhD from Columbia University, writing on the historical entanglement between spiritual and technical dimensions of water stewardship in the Andes, where they participated in urban-rural articulations for water justice as educator and organizer.
lily gold is a white, queer, chronically ill, fourth-generation new yorker of the anti-zionist jewish diaspora, making dance and interdisciplinary art. absurdly specific and playful with mess, gold’s work attempts to answer probing questions and embraces contradictory truths with reverent irreverence. using improvisatory methods to generate movement, text and song—their research material tears, weaves and unravels into performance. perhaps maximal in subtle disguise, their dances are dynamic worlds within which the audience is tossed a raft to float the rivers of their emotion. gold is a trauma-informed somatic therapist, officiant, witch and organizer—accountable to larger liberatory movements within and beyond creative practice.
Sarah Ema Friedland is a media artist and educator whose work is rooted in non-fiction, often drawing on the vocabularies of speculative fiction and fantasy to re-imagine reality. Her films and installations have screened internationally at festivals, museums and galleries and have been supported by fellowships including Jerome, Ford, NYSCA, MacDowell, LABA, and the Palestinian American Research Center. Her recent feature documentary LYD, co-directed with Rami Younis, premiered at the 2023 Amman International Film Festival, where it won a Jury Prize and a FIPRESCI. She is the Director of the Liberal Studies Global Media Lab at NYU, is on the Board of the Flaherty Film Seminar, and is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective.
Rosa Estherina is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her storytelling centers around Sephardic life and Jewish Levantine culture, drawing on her family history as members of the historic Jewish community of Palestine - also known as Yerushalmi. Her work is an equal mix of cultural reclamation and play, exploring themes including life, death, community, love, friendship, food, sickness, and cats. She is currently working on an anthology of Zines teaching the Ladino language. You can find more of her art and writing at: https://www.instagram.com/rosa.estherina/
Jake Sol Davidson is an artist who works with film, video, and animation. Screenings include Anthology Film Archives New York, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing, and University of California Berkeley. Exhibitions include MoMA PS1 and Center for Electronic Arts Norway. Residencies include Art Council Korea, Taipei Artist Village, and Fondazione Antonio Ratti. He is the co-author of Cloud Chambers, a book exploring computation as vaporous. For 2023-24 he received the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies Award, Yale University. He is currently a resident artist with Arts Council Korea.
Sam Day Harmet is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. A musician of diverse tastes, Sam's projects range from deconstructive folk and jazz, to free improvisation, to left field electronic music, to Soundpainting and beyond. He has also written extensively in theater settings often composing material that blurs the lines between far flung styles and disciplines. Regular collaborators include La Banda Chuska, Astroturf Noise, and numerous klezmer artists. He can also be found cassette DJing and producing electronic music under the alias Sam Gøødy. He holds an MFA from Brooklyn College's interdisciplinary Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) program. More at: http://samdayharmet.com
Gabrielle Egnater is an artist and educator working in Grand Rapids, MI. She has exhibited at venues including the University of Albany, HTW Berlin University of Applied Sciences, and Spertus Institute. Gabrielle received her BFA in Sculpture and Visual Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA in the Sculpture Dimensional Studies Program at Alfred University. Her previous positions include Instructor of Record at Alfred University and Lecturer at California State University San Marcos. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Sculpture and 3D Foundations at Grand Valley State University.
Ron Shalom is a composer, producer, installation artist, multi-instrumentalist, and theater maker in New York City. His sound sculptures and permanent public installations have been exhibited internationally. He is the founder and Music Director of Belly Chorus, a community choir and laboratory for new vocal works. Minivan is his disintegrating electropop drag spectacle featuring custom lighting instruments, original music, camp couture, and instructional choreography. Ron is often engaged as a composer for film and theater, as a genre-defying producer, and as a music director.
Photo by G.P. Selvaggio
Adrienne Renée Weiss is an Ashkenazi dyke and spell-casting spinster whose current work exists in a realm of wild Queer mysticism—an earthly, fluid, and sensual investigation of somatics and esoteric lore. She spins yarn, weaves, forges and welds steel, molds clay, writes, and performs community rituals. Adrienne considers ancient technologies and encoded materials as a method of subversion, a way to participate in the collective endeavor to radically imagine life beyond the dark age we currently find ourselves in. She holds BA’s in Art History and American Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by Lydia Daniller
Lois Taylor Biggs is a writer, curator, and art historian based in Chicago. She is interested in abstraction and desire, in questions of repair and philosophies of history. She recently curated Gagizhibaajiwan (2024), a Center for Native Futures exhibition on paradox in Anishinaabe art, and her writing appears in Frieze, Forging, Momus, and C Magazine. Lois holds a Fulbright-funded MA in Social History of Art from the University of Leeds and is currently the Rice Curatorial Fellow in Native American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and of White Earth Ojibwe and Jewish descent.
Photo by Alice Feldt @alicefeldtphoto
emet ezell is an artist living between Berlin, Germany, and the United States. Their work spans themes of devotion, dispossession, ruin, and return. Trained in the studio of Robert Sawa, ezell engages the letter as the visceral and tactile unit of composition. Their work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, European Commission for Culture and Creativity, Pedvāle Open Air Art Museum, Berlin Senate, and Djerassi Resident Artist’s Program, among others. Recent work can be found in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and In Geveb, and their writing has been translated into German, Latvian, and Polish.
Photo by Ben Mönks
Shasha Dothan is a Brooklyn-based artist working across video, painting, drawing, and installation. Her works interweave fragments of personal history to explore identity, memory, and belonging, responding to the realities they inhabit. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Blum & Poe, Human Resources, MCLA Gallery 51, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, and Working Assumption. Dothan was a Lunder Institute Fellow and artist-in-residence at the Peleh Family Residency, as well as many other residencies. She holds a BFA from Shenkar College and an MFA from UCLA.
Michael Zalta is a writer, producer, editor, and scholar raised in Brooklyn’s orthodox Syrian Jewish community. His plays have been developed and presented at the Lark, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, NYU’s Jerry H. Labowitz Theater, The Tank, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. His writing appears in Zaman Collective and Protocols. He has produced experimental films including Amanda Kramer’s Give Me Pity! and Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s Dream Team, and edits for scholars, advocacy organizations, and artists. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature from USC and is a member of Ensemble Studio Theater LA’s New West Cohort.
Amanda Horowitz is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual art and theater. She writes and directs performances using experimental and collaborative methods. Recent projects include Fashion (Exponential Festival, 2026), Bad Stars (Collapsable Hole, Prelude Festival, STARS Gallery, Bad Water Gallery, 2023-2025) and Heavenly Fools (Mason Gross Playwriting Festival, 2023). From 2013 to 2018, she co-founded and directed Medium Judith, a performance collaborative with Bully Fae Collins. Amanda holds a dual MFA in visual art and playwriting from Rutgers University.
Casey Carsel unravels the complexities and constructions of cultural belonging and home in diaspora, from stories to jokes to the clothes on one’s back and the food on one’s table. What is cherished and how is it held? What is left behind? What is lost in translation? The interdisciplinary works that result from these questions are imbued by dybbuks, golems, ancestors, and the visual, oral and written languages that hold them. Casey earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Auckland, and has held residencies and fellowships with the New York Public Library, Tides Museum of Art, and Fulbright Ukraine, among others.
Photo by Leah Wendzinski
caseycarsel.com
Nurit Chinn is a playwright and producer from London, now based in Brooklyn. Her plays have been produced or presented at BAM Fisher, Lincoln Center, Camden Fringe Festival, VAULT Festival, and Dixon Place. She is a 2025 Alliance/Kendeda finalist, a 2024 Eugene O’Neill NPC semifinalist, and graduate of The Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers’ Group. Nurit’s nonfiction appears in Haaretz, Washington Square Review, the British Journal of Photography, and others. She teaches playwriting at Brooklyn College, where she recently completed her MFA.
Photo by Niyoosha Ahmadikhoo
David Markus is a writer, organizer, and professor of expository writing at NYU. His recent work focuses on social practices in contemporary art and Jewish belonging in the wake of the Holocaust and in the context of occupied Palestine. His writing appears in Afterimage, Art Journal, Parapraxis, Fence, Frieze, Art in America, and Bomb. He is the author of Notes on Trumpspace: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Fantasy of Home. Markus proudly serves on the organizing committee of NYU Contract Faculty United - UAW, which in 2024 achieved recognition as the largest full-time faculty union among private universities in the United States.
Photo by Avani Tanya
Will Maxen is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Houston, Texas, who works primarily in the language of painting. Maxen paints from sourced imagery pulled from personal and historical experiences arranged into fictional and abstract situations. The paintings shift between landscape artifacts and interior scenes inspired by Maxen’s interactions in everyday life. The work follows the connections between memory, intimacy, environment and belonging in literal and metaphorical space through the levels of legibilities.
Photo by Jordan Benton
Isa Spector is a performer, choreographer, and theater maker living in New York. Their work has been shown at Abrons Arts Center, Performance Space New York, Center for Performance Research, and Pageant. As a performer, Isa has worked with Korakrit Arunanondchai, boychild, Danielle Agami, Sam Max, and Alexa West. Isa holds a BFA in Dance and BA in Dramatic Literature from New York University.
Photo by Iliana Penichet-Ramirez
Olive Stefanski is a queer visual artist working in Chicago. Their studio practice encompasses weaving, dyeing, spinning yarn, drawing, glass making and mixed media sculpture and installation. Their work is grounded in the study of Jewish ideas and texts, focused thus far on mysticism, creation, cosmology and divinity. They have had solo exhibitions at Roman Susan Art Foundation (2021) and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago (2023). Their 2023 solo exhibition, Becoming One Who Holds Many, was awarded a Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program Grant. Olive earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by Armando Lozano
olivestefanski.com
Jordan Wax is a multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer based in New Mexico. For the past twenty five years he has studied intergenerational music traditions with elders from a variety of cultural lineages in the Ozarks, Mexico, Ecuador, New Mexico, and throughout Yiddishland, and directed collaborative ensembles in the context of Ashkenazi, Ozark and Indo-Hispanic cultural revitalizations. In addition to ongoing projects with poly-ethnic traditions in New Mexico, his current work centers his songwriting in Yiddish. His debut album, טײַטש | The Heart Deciphers will be released in 2025, followed by פּאַנטאַקאָזאַק | Pantakozak, a collection of original Yiddish songs for children and families.
Photo by Annie Quick
jordanwax.com
Sol Weiss is a queer Ashkenazi cultural organizer whose work explores how land, kinship and tradition can support us in overcoming oppression, healing from colonization and building new worlds. They work in relief printmaking, bookbinding, illustration, and design, and collaborate to co-create visual representations of social change and cultural transformation. When not in the print shop, the kitchen or the garden, Sol works with Tzedek Lab as Director of Communications and Resource Sharing, supporting a network of visionaries and changemakers moving the Jewish world to fight antisemitism, racism and white supremacy.
Photo by Rebecca Bloomfield
solweiss.com
Emily Bass is a writer, visual artist, historian, and activist focusing on pandemics, the forces that perpetuate them, and the movements within bodies and in communities that recognize and resist them. Her first book, To End a Plague, was a shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. Her current initiative, The Dendron Project, includes an experimental biography of the dendritic cell, interactive performance and artwork that uses text, gesture and assemblage to render experiences of and questions about danger, protection, and possibilities for healing. She is a Creative Capital Awardee, a NYSCA NYFA non-fiction fellowship recipient and a Culture Push Associated Artist.
Photo by Virginia L.S. Freire
emilybass.club
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and comics creator working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture and third-generation restorative work. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016), You Are Not A Guest (Fieldmouse Press, August 2023), and Victory Parade (Schocken/Pantheon, April 2024). Her short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Tablet Magazine, Nautilus, and The Nib. She is a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop, and an instructor at Rhode Island School of Design. She is a Yaddo Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and the recipient of the Xeric Grant, the Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, the Helix Fellowship, and the Koyama Provides Grant.
Photo by Dena Rosenberg
leelacorman.com
Leah Galant is a Jewish filmmaker and Fulbright Scholar based in New York. She was recognized as one of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40. Leah's directorial debut On the Divide premiered at Tribeca and broadcast on POV PBS and follows three people connected to the last abortion clinic on the US/Texas border. She was a Sundance Ignite and Jacob Burns Fellow where she created Death Metal Grandma (SXSW 2018) about 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Inge Ginsberg. Leah is a member of Meerkat Media worker-owned cooperative film production company. She is working on her second feature-length film about memorialization culture.
Photo by Jasmine Curtis
leahgalant.com
Efrat Hakimi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Hakimi uses digital and traditional image-making techniques to study and interpret objects, narratives, and sites. She received the Presser Award for Israeli Photographer (2020) and the Katz International Photography Award (2018). She has exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Roots & Culture, Chicago; 6018 North, Chicago; Hayarkon 19 Gallery, Tel Aviv, among others. Hakimi holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), studied at HaMidrasha-Faculty of the Arts (2016), and has a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Ben-Gurion University (2010).
efrathakimi.com
Isabel Mattia is an artist, fabricator, teacher, doula/lactation counselor, and parent. Her work explores grieving, love, loss, and caregiving, and how these complex experiences shape identity. She lives on a small sheep farm in rural Rhode Island, and works both at home and in her space within Smokestack Studios in Fall River, Massachusetts. Mattia teaches as a critic in the Sculpture Department at Rhode Island School of Design and in the Welding department at the Steel Yard in Providence, RI. She has also taught at Brown University.
isabelmattia.com
Avila Eytan Do Espirito Santo is a music based artist at the intersection of art, creative media, spirituality and indigenous thought. His principal instrument is percussion, and he use a variety of drums and rhythms as the foundation for his compositions. His musical influences are rooted in the rich diversity of diasporic cultures' electronic and acoustic music. Avila's work exists at the intersection of creativity and social justice, touching topics of socio-economics, race, environmentalism, and temporality. His work has been commissioned by HBO, LACMA, Sony Music, BLK NWS, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and more.
avilasanto.com
Diva Nigun (real name Sam Slate) is a Jewish music producer and performer, specializing in electronic Jewish dance music, remixes, lo-fi, meditation, and everything in between! A main performer at the NYC Kleztronica series and Boston's Gragger Purim party, Diva has played her all-original Jewish dance set for hundreds of young Jews. She combines queer expression, Yiddishkayt and Klezmer, the devotional scene, Jewish history and tradition, and modern pop production to create the bangers for which her Jewish communities long. Always down to collaborate, support other artists, teach production, and sample whatever comes her way, she is both a core artist and a community leader in the burgeoning electronic Jewish music scene.
Photo by Mira Whiting
Adrienne Westwood is a Brooklyn-based artist whose multi-layered work incorporates objects into embodied explorations of memory, bringing traces of other times and places into the present moment. Her work for cottages, flip books, nooks, crannies, screens, gardens, voicemails, as well as traditional theaters, has been presented widely in NYC and at Jacob's Pillow, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), The Firkin Crane (Ireland), and The Philly Fringe Festival.
Photo by Whitney Browne
adriennewestwood.com
Jett Allen is a trans/non-binary cartoonist, writer, and illustrator based in Los Angeles, California. Jett’s work often blends film criticism, history, and memoir to explore questions about identity. His visual essays, illustrations and comics have been published by: The New Yorker, The LA Times, MUBI's The Notebook, Granta, Into, Spiralbound, Human Parts, and more. His series “Trans Classic Movies” has recently been nominated for an Ignatz award. Jett has taught comics workshops for The Believer, The Sequential Arts Workshop, Mount San Antonio College, and Williams College.
jettallen.com
Photo by Teddy Pozo
Avi Amon is an award-winning, Turkish-American composer, sound artist, and educator. Avi’s music for theater, film, and dance has been developed or presented by: Cannes Film Festival, HBO Films, Hulu, Spotify, Tribeca Film Festival, Ars Nova, The Civilians, Danspace, New York Theater Workshop, Page73, PlayCo, Roundabout Theater, SoHo Rep, Target Margin, Actors Theater Of Louisville, Edinburgh Fringe, The O’Neill, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, and St. Louis REP, among others. Avi is the resident composer at the 52nd Street Project, an inaugural fellow with THE WORKSHOP, and teaches at NYU Tisch.
aviamon.com
Photo by Jeremy Mauriac
Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), and Transmediale (Berlin), among others. Her latest book is The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2021). She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, and lives and works in Oakland, CA.
liatberdugo.com
Photo by Jason Huff
Jay Eddy is a writer, composer, and performer interested in hybrid and transdisciplinary forms integrating music; theater and performance art; film; sound and transmission arts; installation; testimony and memoir; poetry and essay; translation; and ritual. They are a recent Richard Rodgers awardee, New Harmony and Yaddo resident, New York Foundation for the Arts and Connecticut Office of the Arts fellow. Their work has been called, “Bracingly original, astonishingly resourceful, and daringly theatrical,” and, “a joy to listen to...a beautiful tapestry of sound.” As a performer, they’ve been called, “Kate McKinnon on a cocaine bender.”
jayeddy.com
Photo by Sam Plattus
Shterna Goldbloom received their MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2019). They are an OTD artist and educator in Chicago, IL. Their photography has been exhibited in EXPOChicago, the RISD Museum, Galerie Camille, and in the Mint Museum. They are the grateful recipient of many prizes including the RISD Museum Dorner Prize, HBI Artist Program, the Hahnemühle Award, and Creators of Culture Grant. Their work can be seen in Arts Everywhere, Artforum, Ha'aretz, Hyperallergic, In Geveb, Judisk Krönika, Lilith Magazine, and The New Yorker.
shternagoldbloom.com
Adam Golfer is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. His practice combines elements of photography, personal essay films, and installations, and resides in the slippery space between history and memory, often exploring multiple, overlapping narratives.
Exhibitions of his work have been shown at the MoCP in Chicago, Nurture Art, Hunter College, Booklyn and the 92nd Street Y. His short films have been featured at the Outfest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival, Frameline, Picture Farm, and in BOMB.
In 2016, Golfer was awarded the Snider Prize in Photography and an Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Grant. His book, A House Without a Roof, was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation-Paris Photo First Book Award.
Golfer holds an MFA from Hunter College in New York and is a proud member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.
adgolf.xhbtr.com
Katz Tepper is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, text, installation, sculpture, and clothing. Their work is concerned with entanglements that dissolve boundaries between internal and external. Roasted Cockroach for Scale, their recent film made with their Soviet-Israeli-American father and various corporate screen-based communication interfaces, has been presented at Cushion Works (San Francisco), the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Fluentum (Berlin), and Jewish Currents. Their work has been supported by White Columns, Atlanta Contemporary, the Wynn Newhouse Foundation, MacDowell, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Skowhegan School of Art. Tepper is based in Athens, GA where they teach place-based arts curriculum at UGA.
katyatepper.com
Photo by Mo Costello
Mariya Zilberman is a writer whose poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Columbia Journal, and Guesthouse. She won the 2020 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award in Poetry, and has also received support from organizations such as the Vermont Studio Center, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Yiddish Book Center. Mariya was born in Minsk, Belarus and now lives in Detroit, Michigan. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches. She is at work on her first poetry collection.
mariyazilberman.com
Photo by Kristen Brunelli
Hadar Ahuvia is an independent dancer, choreographer, Jewish educator and service leader weaving her love of movement, song, and Jewish community in NYC/Lenapehoking for the past ten years. She is a performer with Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group and works at synagogues across the Jewish denominations. Her choreographic work has been supported by Baryshnikov Arts Center, the 14th St. Y, Danspace Project, Yaddo, Movement Research, and Gibney Dance among others. Ahuvia is a recipient of a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, was one of Dance Magazine’s "25 to Watch in 2019," and a 2020 New Jewish Culture Fellow with Tatyana Tenebaum. Her essay on choreographing a diasporic Israeli identity beyond Zionism is featured in the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance.
Photo by Maria Baranova
hadarahuvia.com
Lilah Akins is an artist and filmmaker who earned her second BA at the University of Southern Maine's Geography-Anthropology program with a focus in Cultural and Natural Heritage Management. Lilah has been the Wabanaki Outreach Coordinator for Nibezun and currently works with
Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness. She was born and raised on Oahu, Hawaii, and is an enrolled member of the Penobscot Nation and also of Jewish, Cherokee, and settler-colonial descent.
Zoë Aqua was awarded a Fulbright research grant for the 2021–2022 academic year to study Transylvanian folk music pedagogy in Cluj, Romania. An in-demand violinist in the klezmer scene, Zoë is a co-founder of Tsibele and Farnakht, and performs regularly with Litvakus, Ternovka, the Honorable Mentschn, and more. In 2017, she served as the full-time understudy for the Klezmatics’ Lisa Gutkin in the Broadway production of Indecent, ultimately going onstage over eighteen times. Tsibele’s debut album It's Dark Outside/In Droysn iz Finster was released in 2017 and features dark and atmospheric original arrangements of Yiddish songs. Farnakht’s debut album Ultraviolet was released in 2018 and combines new compositions with klezmer, Romanian, Serbian and Hungarian folk music.
zoeaqua.com
Laura Elkeslassy is a vocalist specialized in North African and Middle Eastern music. With Moroccan and Israeli roots, Laura regularly performs Judeo-Arab music in Arabic, Ladino, and Hebrew. Her current work focuses on reclaiming the cultural heritage of Jews from Arab lands from a feminist perspective. Concert credits include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, DROM, La Nacional, JCC NY & DC, the American Sephardi Federation, BMS East by Middle East Festival, and the World Music Institute.
lauraelkeslassy.com/
Rebecca S'manga Frank is an actor, writer, and theatre director who is passionate about developing work as an intersectional leader advocating for Black lives.
rebeccasmangafrank.com
Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, assimilation, care, ability, and embodiment. She is author of My Fault, selected by Eileen Myles for the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize, and Static Place, in addition to other books of prose, poetry, and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Bookforum, the Millions, the New York Times, and the Believer, among others. Leora holds degrees with honors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers and Brown University. She has taught online and in person in universities, homes, and retreat centers, and collaborates widely with artists, writers, and community groups. She is a recipient of support, grants, and residencies from organizations including Fulbright, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, Caldera, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
leorafridman.com
Ben Gassman’s plays include Botte di Ferro, Purimacolo, Independent Study, 40s & Chestnuts, and The Downtown Loop. With Sam Soghor, Ben devised the performance piece Sam's Tea Shack. Culinary Theater is his ongoing collaboration with the director Brandon Woolf; together they build performances that taste and smell. Ben is from Queens and his work revels in the colliding voices of the impolitely cosmopolitan periphery.
bengassman.com
Jake Goldwasser is a poet and cartoonist based in Brooklyn and Iowa City. His cartoon art can be found in The New Yorker. His poetry can be found in The New England Review, Grist, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
jake-goldwasser.com
Lily Henley is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who has brought her melodically rich songwriting style and synergistic exploration of Sephardi and American folk traditions to audiences across the United States and abroad. She has performed solo, with her own band, and alongside numerous artists including clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer, fiddler Brittany Haas, Grammy-nominees Rushad Eggleston and Canadian folk group The Duhks, as well as Irish guitar phenom John Doyle, and in video collaborations with the Emmy-nominated Shanghai Restoration Project.
lilyhenley.com
Adah Hetko pursues diverse interests within the Yiddish cultural world and beyond. She is lead vocalist and dance leader for the Western Massachusetts-based klezmer band Burikes, and also performs with duos Adah and Allison and Adah and her Brother. In 2018 she defended her thesis “Contemporary Yiddish Women Singers and their Development of Yiddish Identity” to earn an MA in Jewish Studies from Indiana University. As a Graduate Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst MA, from 2018–2019, Adah contributed to Asya Schulman’s Yiddish textbook for beginners, In Eynem, and researched the history of Yiddish typewriters. She has been a fellow at KlezKanada, a faculty member at Yiddish New York, and she coordinated multidisciplinary programs for KlezKanada’s 2020 virtual retreat. In addition to performing traditional songs, she composes new Yiddish songs and poetry settings, and English-language adaptations and translations. Her translation of Sophie Tucker’s “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” was included in the volume How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, edited by Ilan Stavans and Joshua Lambert, published by Restless Books in 2020.
adahhetko.net
Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a cultural worker and organizer based on
the northern estuary of Lenapehoking, at Brooklyn's Glitter House. Can’t
stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of
them; never figured out how to make art for art’s sake; rarely wants to
work alone. Active in abolition feminist organizing with Survived &
Punished NY. Just another
gendertreyf diasporist mischling who identifies with, not as.
Photo by Noah Church
meansof.org
Ellie Lobovits' art practice spans diverse media, including photography, film, and writing. Self-portraiture, imagery of the natural world, and first-person narratives are recurring elements in her exploration of the intersections of feminist identity, the body,
land, loss, and memory. Interweaving autobiographical elements with current socio-political issues, she explores what occurs in the space of juxtaposition between the so-called private and public spheres. Ellie also teaches about the wild and cultivated plant world, and is the co-creator of the workshop series Jewish Plant Magic.
ellielobovits.com
Michael McCanne was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and holds a Master’s Degree in Cultural History from Goldsmiths University of London. He was a 2017 fellow at Tent: Creative Writing at The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, a 2018 resident at the Mount Lebanon Residency in New Lebanon, NY, and a 2020 fellow at the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. He received a grant from the 2020 Wave Farm/NYSCA Media Arts Assistance Fund to complete his first film A Minor Figure, a collaboration with Jamie Weiss. The film was selected to premiere as part of the 2021 edition of Documenta Madrid and as part of Curtocircuito International Film Festival.
michaelmccanne.com
Tyler Rai is a movement artist and writer currently based in Nipmuc/Pocumtuc Territories (Western Massachusetts). Through performance and movement improvisation, her research questions how we embody kinship and relational empathy with the other/more-than-human-world. Her works have been performed at Judson Memorial Church, ARC Pasadena, SPACE Gallery, SWALE (a barge and floating food-forest), and The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. She has collaborated with numerous artists and organizations and performed in the works of K.J. Holmes, Emily Johnson/Catalyst, Bouchra Ouizguen, Athena Kokoronis/Domestic Performance Agency, and Mina Nishimura. Her writings have been published in Culturebot, John Hopkins Medical Magazine for the Humanities, and Tendon Magazine.
tylerrai.com
Cory Tamler is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in theatre, performance as research, and community organizing. A core artist with Open Waters in Wabanaki/Maine, she has collaborated with the Penobscot River watershed and In Kinship Fellowship since 2015. She is writing her dissertation in theatre and performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
corytamler.com
Ira Khonen Temple is a multi-instrumentalist, music director, and embedded cultural organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. Recent credits include accordionist for Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish off Broadway, and music director of Indecent at the Weston Playhouse, Great Small Works’ Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls, the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee Purimshpil, and Zoe Beloff’s Days of the Commune. Ira was a founder of the radical-traditional Yiddish music group Tsibele.
Ira creates music that is a doorway between past, present, and possible futures. Working with people of diverse ages and backgrounds, Ira develops new Jewish culture that is politically fresh, relevant, and un-nostalgic while building connections between languages, communities, and time periods.
iratemple.com
Tatyana Tenenbaum employs breath, voice, fascia, and musculature to excavate spaces of memory, power, and transformation. Her work sits at the juncture of experimental music and dance and has been described as “rich polyphony” (The New Yorker) and “transcending the fraught history between utterance and stance through an exacting inquiry” (Critical Correspondence). She has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Temple University, Movement Research, School for Contemporary Dance & Thought, Danspace Project, and Pliegues y Despliegues festival in Bogotá, Colombia. She has performed with and learned from Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, Jennifer Monson/iLAND, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born, and Hadar Ahuvia, among others.
Photo by Maria Baranova
tatyanatenenbaum.com
Shay Arick is an Israeli visual artist based in Brooklyn and Tel Aviv. Arick is a recipient of Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Arts Award, Eileen Cooper Award For Creativity, and HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts Artist Grant among others. He received support through many residencies and fellowships, including Residency Unlimited, SIP Fellowship, The Watermill Center, Kadist Foundation, MASS MoCA, BRIC, Wassaic Project, and Ox-Bow. His work has been shown in venues such as Haifa Museum Of Art (Haifa), Y Gallery (New York), Watermill Center (New York), SOMarts (San Francisco), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), OnSpace (Beijing), and ZIZ Space (Tel Aviv).
Arick holds an MFA in Sculpture from The San Francisco Art Institute, and BFA from Bezalel Academy, Israel.
Danielle Durchslag's work explores the political and psychological complexities of American Jewish wealth, the experience she comes from. She has exhibited at art spaces and film festivals around the world, at venues including The Jewish Museum, the Toronto Shorts International Film Festival, the Invisible Dog Art Center, The UK Jewish Film Festival, Winkleman Gallery, The Bronx Museum, Foley Gallery, The Ackland Art Museum, The Moscow Jewish Film Festival, Davidson Gallery, The Jewish Museum of Maryland, The Cannes Short Film Festival, Yale University, The New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and Denny Dimin Gallery. Danielle’s work has been discussed in The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Tablet, The Independent, The Forward, and The New York Observer, among others. She is a selected fellow of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and a grant recipient from the inaugural cycle of the NYFA Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre.
danielledurchslag.com
Dan Fishback is a playwright and performing artist from New York City. Fishback founded the Helix Queer Performance Network in 2013, through which he conceived and curated the annual series "La MaMa's Squirts: Generations of Queer Performance." His musical The Material World was called one of the "Top 10 Plays of 2012" by Time Out New York. He has released several albums and music videos, both solo and with his band Cheese On Bread. Fishback is a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
Photo by Christopher Risch
Ariel Goldberg's publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). They are a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for their book in progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Jewish Currents, Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. Their research and writing has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, New York Public Library, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and SOMA in Mexico City. Goldberg has been a curator at The Poetry Project, The Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. They teach across multiple universities in New York.
Photo by Dan Paz
Nat Sufrin’s poems have appeared in Fence, TriQuarterly, the Antioch Review, and Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press). He received a Research and Travel Grant from Asylum Arts to travel to Poland, and attended the inaugural Asylum: International Jewish Artist Retreat. He studied English literature at Swarthmore College and is currently a PhD student in clinical psychology at The City University of New York.
Nora Rodriguez is an artist and educator working primarily with animation and sound. Nora's work has screened at REDCAT in LA, the Block Cinema in Chicago, Pioneer Works, and Anthology Film Archives in New York, among other venues. Nora is interested in producing media as part of a strategy to build living, community-driven archives.
nrodriguez.com
Arielle Angel grew up in Miami, Florida and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.
She has been awarded artist residencies at Hub-Bub in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artists Guild in Woodstock, New York; the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; Jentel in Banner, Wyoming; and Abode Farm in New Lebanon, NY. She was a 2016 Fellow at Tent: Creative Writing at The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. In addition to Jewish Currents, her work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Off Assignment, and Protocols.
She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and also holds a degree in Studio Art and Creative Writing from NYU.
arielleangel.com
Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet and the author of R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City, where she works as a literary assistant to the poet Gerald Stern.
Julia Elsas was born in Birmingham, Alabama and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her visual art encompasses ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance.
Julia has been an artist-in-residence at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Gowanus Studio Space, Brooklyn, NY; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA; and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA. She was a 2018–2019 New Jewish Culture Fellowship recipient and a 2019–2020 Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Print Shop.
juliaelsas.com
Fancy Feast is a professional naked person. She is Miss Coney Island 2016, Miss Bushwick Burlesque 2014, and is the recipient of the Judges' Choice Award for Most Classic at the Alternatease festival in Boston in 2014. She is known for blending humor and edge in her genre-bending performances, which is exactly how she likes it. Along with Zoe Ziegfeld, she is the co-producer of the monthly show, "The Fuck You Revue." She is the producer of "Hindsight" and "Now You See Us, Now We're Drunk," as part of the NYSB Drivers' Seat Program, as well as the creator and producer of the smash successes The Unbookables and Maim That Tune at Coney Island. In addition to her performing and producing, Fancy is a sought-after femme-cee for burlesque, comedy shows, and Bar Mitzvahs.
fancyfeastburlesque.com
Tom Haviv is a writer and multimedia artist. His debut book of poetry, A Flag of No Nation, was published by Jewish Currents Press in 2019. His writing has been published internationally and translated into multiple languages. He is the co-founder of Ayin Press and the author of a children's book, Woven (2018).
Sam Reider is a pianist, accordionist, composer, and educator from San Francisco, California. His work brings together various streams of American music, from jazz and folk tunes to popular song and contemporary composition. Reider first learned to play the piano from his father, a musical theater composer. In high school, Reider studied jazz, performed around the country with other young musicians, and was featured on Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” on NPR. At Columbia University in New York City, he majored in American Studies and fell in love with folk music. While writing his thesis comparing the songwriting of Woody Guthrie and Ira Gershwin, Reider picked up an old accordion and began learning bluegrass and old-time tunes. This set him off on a journey that has taken him from back porches and dive bars to concert halls and major festivals all around the world.
samreidermusic.com
Naomi Safran-Hon was born in Oxford, England and grew up in Haifa, Israel. She received her BA Summa Cum Laude from Brandeis University, 2008, in Studio Art and Art History and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. Safran-Hon attended Skowhegan in 2012 and Art Omi in 2016. She was a 2019–2020 Workspace Resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Safran-Hon had solo exhibitions at Slag Gallery, NYC, RX Gallery, Paris, Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam, and Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, TX, and group shows at the Haifa Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and P.P.O.W Gallery. Safran-Hon was a recipient of the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize in 2020.
naomisafranhon.com
Arielle Stein is a visual artist and rabbinical student. She received her BFA from NYU in 2014 and currently studies at Hebrew Union College. Arielle has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Germany, and Israel-Palestine.
relstein.com
Daniel Terna is a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography and video. Terna’s work focuses on family and inherited trauma, blending autobiographical narratives with a tourist’s approach to exploring sites, be they memorials, cities, personal archives, or the body itself.
danielterna.com
