Tal Yizrael is an artist, curator, collaborator, and educator. Her interests lay in intersections, transdisciplinary research, and serendipity. As an artist, she works both as a collaborator and as an individual artist fascinated by the ethereal, fragile moments that usually stand between order and disorder.
In 2008, she founded the Department of Nocturnal Affairs (DNA) with artist Caroline Maxwell. Envisioned as both a work of installation and performance art, the DNA has opened field offices in various public spaces around Los Angeles and the world to collect reports of nocturnal wildlife sightings. Since 2015, she has been a part of the SASA group of artists and scientists that examines the phenomenon of spontaneous self-assembly, an area of research rooted in statistical mechanics, where local interactions between objects can exert long-range ordering. The manifestations and mechanisms of order–disorder transitions are examined in systems of varying sizes: from molecules to human behavior and mixed systems, as realized in “Fragile Formation.” The joint research, which began as part of the Nano Art Lab project initiated by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, incorporates live experiments, performances, and video screenings.
As a curator, she is interested in an interdisciplinary approach and collaborations of art and science. She curated projects such as: “Invitation to Collaboration—the Studio as a Lab” at the California Institute of Technology, “Contemporary Landscapes” at the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts, Pomona, California, and others. She is the curator of “NANO—The Fetter Museum of Art and Nanoscience” at the BINA Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials of Bar Illan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. There, she fosters collaborations of artists and scientists that lead to transdisciplinary research.
As an educator, she is leading the lecturer’s forum for art and art education at Mofet Institute of Education. She also has been lecturing at art colleges in Israel and in the US. She has been a member of the steering committee and educational program development of the Center of Art and Sustainability of Beit Berl College of Education and the city of Kfar Saba, Israel.
Yizrael was a prize recipient of the artist–teacher grant from the Israeli Ministry of Culture 2012–2014. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, in 2006.