Mor Presiado

Research areas:

• Art and gender
• Jewish identity in women's art and feminist art in Israel and the United States
• Holocaust and post-Holocaust art
• Gender, holocaust and art
• War in modern and contemporary art
• Art and disease in modern and contemporary art
• The trauma of the Holocaust is evidence of memory and its immersion in women's art

Dr. Presiado investigates the artistic expressions of personal and national trauma in the following ways: Holocaust and Holocaust memory; gender; Illness, recovery and healing through art.

Dr. Presiado's latest publications deal with gender aspects of dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust in women's art from 1939 to the present day in Europe, Israel and the United States. Among other things, her research reveals the unique artistic language used by female artists. This language combines the familiar symbols and themes of the Holocaust such as the barbed wire fences, the train tracks, the chimneys and the scream with a set of images that includes descriptions of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, female solidarity, the loss of female appearance, sexual abuse and more. These images are influenced by the experiences of women during and after the Holocaust, which resulted from the processes of female socialization, from female physiology, from the Nazi worldview that was directed against them, from the female society that surrounded them in the camps, and from the social-gender expectations for the reconstruction of life after the Holocaust.

This gender observation reveals that women provide additional and new perspectives on the Holocaust in historical, cultural and aesthetic terms.

Dr. Presiado also investigates dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust in the later work of Holocaust survivor artists. Her research reveals that in addition to dealing with the Holocaust, images emerge in the works that present other episodes of the creator's life, including her childhood, starting a family after the Holocaust, immigration and the acquisition of a new national identity. These works wrap the past in the present, thus reflecting both the memory and the rehabilitation in the lives of the survivors.

In addition, Dr. Presiado studies the cultural-visual transfer of the trauma of the Holocaust to other areas of trauma. This study points to the connections between images of the disintegration of the body in the Holocaust as they appear in photographs, testimonies and works of art and contemporary images of diseases, especially cancer.

Alongside her academic activities, Dr. Presiado is a senior member of the executive board of the association for the study of women's art and gender in Israel, which encourages research on women artists in Israel and develops the study of gender in Israeli art.

Dr. Persiado did her bachelor's and master's degrees in the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University and wrote her doctoral thesis in the Department of Jewish Art in Bar-Ilan