Artist Bio
b.h. Yael is a Toronto based filmmaker, video and installation artist. Yael’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally and has shown in various settings, from festivals to galleries to community and activist groups, as well as various educational venues.
Her work has been purchased by many universities. Yael’s films and installations have dealt with the many intersections of identity and family; it has focused on activist initiatives in Palestine/Israel, as well as apocalypse, geopolitical and environmental urgencies.
Mike Hoolboom’s edited book, Family States (2021) on Yael’s media works can be downloaded here. Her work is distributed by Vtape, and may be streamed at Cinema Politica’s b.h. Yael Collection.
Yael is a recipient of numerous arts grants including the Chalmers Fellowship award. Her most recent feature work, Letter To My Tribe, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, premiered at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival and has gone on to other festivals including ZagrebDox, and won awards and honorable mentions.
Previous works include, Trading the Future, winner of the ‘Audience Award’ at the Ecofilms festival in Rhodes, Greece; Lessons for Polygamists, which premiered at the Images festival; and No Lies, a one minute short and silent version which won the “Most Original Film by a Local Female Director” award at the Toronto Urban Film Festival and first prize at Gotta Minute Film Festival in Edmonton.
Select titles include: Fresh Blood, A Consideration of Belonging; In the Middle of the Street; and Palestine Trilogy, which includes Deir Yassin Remembered. These and the recent Letter To My Tribe address histories of belonging and rupture, reveal the politics of occupation, and resist accepted narratives of justified oppression, colonialism and apartheid.
Collaborative and collective projects have included Spontaneous Combustion; The Olive Project by the Hardpressed Collective; (of)fences as part of BlahBlahBlah, Re(viewing) Quebec; Split Screens; and the Approximations series with Johanna Householder.
Yael has recently completed a photographic and installation series, Hirsute Pursuit, focusing on the implications of hair in the realm of environmental urgencies, gendered formations, historical trauma, and personal narrative. This work has yet to be exhibited. And she is continuing to work on a memoire, a family story of faith, secrets, and polygamy.
Yael is Professor of Integrated Media in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, and also teaches in the Art & Social Change minor. She is past Chair of Senate and past Assistant Dean and co-programs an arts lecture series, Art Creates Change, as well as other media screenings.
Cinema Politica Artist Talk with director b.h. Yael. Supported by Canada Council for the Arts. View her full artist profile HERE.