Musician, visual artist, writer, translator, dance-leader and educator, I am concerned with how we live in diaspora rooted in our many heritages.
Artists are researchers, and living in diaspora is interdisciplinary: no one language, no one home-place, no one way to tell the story. In all my work — in drawing and installation, in Yiddish song and dance-leading, in queer Jewish ritual, collaborative translation, research, and performance creation — I ask how we can make from both what we have salvaged and what we have lost of our lineages. I ask how we live in our archives not as historians but as artists and Freirean cultural workers, as tinkerers looking for what we need to build sanctuaries and escape routes for one another.
With a degree in Fine Arts and History at Oberlin college and a MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, I have worked in arts-based research internationally including South Africa, the North of Ireland, and Palestine. Supported by a Watson Fellowship, I deepened my inquiry into oral history, storytelling, memory, and memorialization in communities reckoning with violent histories of colonization, conflict, and cultural disruption. My work continues to be animated by how communities grieve and build together in the context of a past that is not past. Thank you to Town Hall Seattle, KUOW, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Temple Hoyne Buell Center, the Open Siddur Project, Humanities Washington, and others, for supporting this work.