Dafna Rehavia

Dafna is an Israeli-born artist and art therapist, currently residing, working, and exhibiting in the Pittsburgh area for the last ten years. Her work is informed by a critical, feminist, and multicultural approach. She deals with themes that are related to survival, identity and healing and their complex relationship to migration, religious constraints, war, and women’s experience. The materials she chooses to work are embodied with cultural and psychological value and allow me to explore the meeting place between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, recognition and erasure, and death and rebirth. Many of her pieces use written texts as an integral part of the artwork.

She employs and combines objects as diverse as menstrual pads, earth, passports, dried garlic, nails, Islamic prayer rugs, gas masks, hair, soap, prayer books, and a baby carriage. These objects are combined with a range of art materials such as clay, plaster, resin, cardboard, paper, various fabrics, and paint. The art forms she uses are collage, mixed media, assemblage, and installation.

The juxtaposition of these objects and materials is used in order to create a dialogue between conflicting forces and ideas, as well as to raise further questions about human existence. She is currently interested in forms and rituals that she artistically explores through the repetition of constructed shapes in plaster and sewn cardboard.

She holds a BFA and BED in Art from Beit Berl State College in Israel, an MA in Creative Art Therapy from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, and a PhD in Therapeutic Arts and Cultural Studies from the University of Derby in the UK.