Devora Neumark has been a practicing interdisciplinary artist for more than twenty-five years. Her latest body of work Radical Beauty for Troubled Times includes the collaborative live art project (with Deborah Margo) entitled: Why Should We Cry? Lamentations in a Winter Garden and a series of dialogic performative events entitled The Jewish Home Beautiful – Revisited. Neumark’s most recent publications include: ‘Performing Aesthetics, Performing Politics: The Jewish Home Beautiful and the Re-shaping of the Jewish Exile Narrative’, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 1:1, (2010), pp. 37–51; ‘Performing Beauty, Practicing Home: Collaborative Live Art and the Transformation of Displacement’, in C. McLean and R. Kelly (eds.) Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, Calgary: Detselig/Temeron Press, (2010), pp. 419-436; ‘Close Proximity’, Performing Ethos 1:1, (2010), pp. 69-83; and Neumark, Devora and Chagnon, Johanne (Eds.) in collaboration with Lachapelle, Louise. Affirming Collaboration: Community and Humanist Activist Art in Québec and Elsewhere, Montréal and Calgary: Engrenage Noir / LEVIER, Detselig Enterprises Ltd. and LUX Éditeur, (2011).

Neumark is a part-time faculty member in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Art program at Goddard College (Vermont).

Neumark entered the Concordia University Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Cultural Humanities doctoral program in September 2008. Her PhD research (funded in part through a two-year SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship) addressed the role that art can play within the emerging interdisciplinary framework articulating the conditions for making home anew for dislocated individuals. At the nexus of this research/creation enquiry – wherein community art practice is both the subject and the working methodology – was a set of questions about home’s properties, associations, and manifestations (or lack-there-of) in the political, cultural, emotional, and embodied realms. Once displaced, what are the conditions necessary for making home anew? What role does beauty play in this complex process? And how do the stories we tell about home, influence our experiences of home? The analysis of this conjuncture between beauty and home is necessary in order to interrogate how the repetition of stylized narratives can construct on the one hand, strong intracultural alliances, and on the other, can contribute to the cycles of violence wherein the settling at home of one population sets into motion domicidal effects that impact another.

http://www.devoraneumark.com
http://www.expoagir.com/en_index.html
http://www.engrenagenoir.ca/blog/en
http://cissc.concordia.ca/phdinhumanities/studentresearch/currentstudentprofiles

Devora Neumark graduated in spring 2012 and continues to maintain a close connection with matralab.