Yelena Zhelezov is a Belarusian-Israeli whose work investigates the body – biological and social – in space and time, through installation, video, and puppetry/object performance. Yelena’s materials are often sourced in architecture, science, film, or civic space. She uses strategies of research and welcomes accidents in her practice. Yelena holds an MFA in Puppetry and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. Since moving to LA, she has shown work at LACMA, Hammer Museum, Big City Forum, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Materials and Applications, Echo Country Outpost, Space 15 Twenty, LA Collective Show, Raid Gallery, IKO IKO Space, CalArts, Pictaplasma-Bordeaux, Elfriede Jelinek International Conference in Berlin, NASA Houston, and International Puppetry Conference London, UK. Currently, Yelena teaches painting to children at a private studio of a fellow Israeli artist, serves as an Arts and Cultural Affairs Commissioner of the City of West Hollywood, and makes music videos. Recent credits include directing music videos for local artists such as Craft Spells, Julia Holter, Henry Wolfe, and Jena Malone, as well as engineering miniature architectural disasters for How are you Doing, directed by Michel Gondry for Living Sisters.
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Los Angeles-based artist Will Deutsch was raised in Orange County and studied Fine Art at UCLA. His works, which range in medium from paper and paint to glass sculpture to performance, explore themes of identity mediated through cultural institutions. Will was awarded the first SEDER microgrant, with which he created a bi-annual Jewish arts and culture zine that will be distributed throughout Los Angeles later this year. Will has shown at the New Wight Gallery, Fly or Die Gallery, The Hive Gallery and TruXtop Gallery among others. Professionally, he has served as an artist for TOMS Shoes and his client list includes CYDWOQ, the Jewish Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and The Los Angeles Theatre Center. His art can be seen in books, prints, album covers, t-shirts, newspapers and magazines.
Tali Tadmor is an Israeli born pianist, music director and vocal coach. She has collaborated with many prominent singers and instrumentalists such as Metropolitan Opera star Angela Meade and composer Eric Whitacre. She has also collaborated with Grammy-Award winning soprano Hila Plitmann, with whom she has performed a variety of concerts ranging in repertoire from Schubert to Nine Inch Nails. Tali has performed in Carnegie Hall, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Great Hall in the heart of China’s Forbidden City. Recent projects with the L.A. Opera include the Recovered Voices Project’s “Brundibar,” a children’s opera composed in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Most recently, she served as music director for the company’s presentation of a newly commissioned opera for Plácido Domingo, “Dulce Rosa.” Though classically trained, Tali is active in a wide variety of musical settings, ranging from world music, pop and worship to her own compositions. Tali received both Master and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in Keyboard Collaborative Arts (KCA). She is currently on faculty at the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Sasha Perry is an award-winning freelance documentary filmmaker and videographer based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Las Vegas, Sasha started in film by covering local protests against nuclear testing sites, animal abuse, and the poor treatment of the city’s homeless population. Escaping Las Vegas, Sasha moved to California, and earned a BFA in Film Production at Chapman University, while continuing to promote social justice through creative and engaging filmmaking. Two of Sasha’s first films traveled around the world playing at film festivals in Japan, Germany, South Africa, and more. 
Paul Ratner was born in the former Soviet Union, and had his first interactions with indigenous people during his early childhood when his family lived in Siberia. Since moving to the US, he has continued to explore his fascination with the Native American community through film. After studying film at Cornell and Chapman Universities, Paul started working as a professional in film and television. He has worked in Hollywood and all over the world (Russia, India, Czech Republic), and made his own short films, music videos and documentaries. Currently, he is in the last stages of post-production on his documentary feature film, The Caveman of Atomic City, which portrays a fringe philosopher who lived in a cave on the territory of the Los Alamos National Lab and came up with his own theory of time and space.
Born in the wild, wonderful state of West Virginia, Becker currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Thematically, Becker’s work invokes tall tales from her upbringing and identification, the politicized history of photography, and the cultural impact of our political economy. Her recent works use interventions in perspectival space, prominent temporal references, and absent subjects to explore the paradox of visually representing what can’t be seen.
An artist, curator and educator, Corrie is a founding member and co-director of Actual Size Los Angeles. Actual Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to encourage situations that activate the exhibition and engage the public. Corrie received her Bachelors in Photography, Philosophy and Art History at Bard College in 2007. Her projects have been profiled in the L.A Times, Mousse Magazine, and Flash Art International. Selected Exhibitions include; The Picture Reason, Woods Gallery, Annandale-on-Hudson; E’clepsydre, HBC, Berlin; Family Stories, Pasadena Museum of History; and Games, Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum. Corrie has initiated art programs at the Women’s Care Cottage in North Hollywood and the Astor Home for Abused Youth in Rhinebeck, New York. She has developed educational programming for Barnsdall Art Center and the Corita Art Center. She worked as a teaching artist with the L.A Philharmonic, L.A County Museum of Art, and Armory Center for the Arts. Corrie was the official photographer of the Bardejov, Slovakia Jewish delegation in 2010.
Jessie Kahnweiler began her love affair with moviemaking as a student at the University of Redlands. While in school, Jessie focused on exploring the human animal and quickly made a name for herself as a passionate documentarian. Jessie’s thesis film, Little America, a documentary exposing the world of America’s truck drivers, was an official selection at the Trade and Row Documentary Film Festival and the Open Engagement Festival. Jessie transitioned into the narrative genre with the slice of life “Ripe,” which chronicles the bittersweet end of a relationship on the cusp of adulthood. Her next short, “Stupid Questions” is about a young feisty casting assistant who holds phony casting session in an effort to find her dream guy. Starring Zelda Williams and Ryan Carnes, “Stupid Questions” is an official selection at the NY International Film Festival, LA Comedy Festival, Hollyshorts, and LA Shortsfest. Jessie makes films so “I don’t have to keep repeating my jokes to my friends!”
Kristen Smiarowski is a choreographer and interdisciplinary artist who creates work for the stage, public sites, gallery settings and film. Commissions to create original choreography have included Skirball Cultural Center, Dancing in the Streets, Edgemar Installations, Saint Joseph Ballet (The Wooden Floor), and Links Hall. Choreographic highlights include “Groundswell,” a site-specific dance at Los Angeles’ Ballona Freshwater Marsh (2006, upcoming performance at the 2011 World Festival of Sacred Music – www.festivalofsacredmusic.org) and “Attempts,” a duet about dance, activism and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, which she created with Tom Young in 2002. She also participates in the work of other artists, including as dramaturge/performer for Simone Forti, and is a founding member of the Los Angeles-based collective, Choreographers Working Group. She has an M.F.A. from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures, 2002. She is an adjunct professor at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches choreography and directs programs that connect dance and social justice.
Poet, composer, and classically trained violinist Alicia Jo Rabins weaves her many talents together to create multi-layered work investigating the intersection of spirituality, tradition and contemporary experience, most recently in her song cycle Girls in Trouble, which tells stories from the perspective of marginalized female figures in the Torah. A classically trained violinist since the age of three, Alicia fell in love with old-time fiddle tunes and klezmer music, playing on the street, touring with various young neo-folk bands, and in 2004 joining the groundbreaking folk-punk group Golem, which reinterprets traditional Gypsy and klezmer tunes with a rock edge. In 2009 she was selected by the US State Department as a musical ambassador for the United States as a violinist, singer, and teaching artist, and performed in Nicaragua, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala as the bandleader of the Hoppin’ John String Band. Along with her musical career Alicia is also a poet, scholar and teacher of Jewish studies, with poems in publications such as Ploughshares, Boston Review, 6 x 6 and Court Green, a MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2009 Workspace Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a MA in Jewish Women’s Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary.