Dafna Kaffeman

Described as "a poetess in glass," Kaffeman's work deals with social and political processes in Israel using several layers—texts that refer to events in the country and images of local flora and fauna—through which she addresses themes such as identity and immigration.

The catalogue of the winners of the 2011 Israeli Minister of Culture prizes describes Kaffeman's work as: "Using a botanic lexicon that reaches into cultural practices of commemoration, sacrifice and mourning, the artist blends local values in meticulously crafted glass and embroidery work."

Kaffeman's works are exhibited in the collections of various museums such as the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Canada, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, England, and the Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, N.Y. She is senior lecturer, and was head of the glass course, at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem between 2005 and 2011.

Since 2002, Kaffeman's increasingly transparent statements, first on politics and now on social issues, have taken two distinct directions. The plant and animal forms that comprise such series as 'Tactual Stimulation' and 'Wolves' are fabricated primarily from flame-worked glass. Kaffeman maintains that her subjects provided her a means to explore human behavior; but even early on her references to nature—a recurring metaphor used by many young Israeli artists—demonstrate her deep kinship with her homeland...Since 2006, Kaffeman has also made mini-environments that consist of embroidered handkerchiefs or felt to which she affixes flame-worked glass plants, sometimes insects...These carefully considered micro-environments present the disparity between beautiful crafted surfaces and disturbing text about aggressors and victims. (From the catalogue Without Camouflage. Dafna Kaffeman. Silvia Levenson, published by the David Owsley Museum of Art, Indiana, April 2014)

Dafna Kaffeman graduated in 1999 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and in 2001 received a Master of Fine Arts from the Sandberg Institute, also in Amsterdam. She had one-person shows, among others, at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design (2015–16); the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, (2014–15); Keramikmuseum Westerwald in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (2013); the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. (2011); and the lorch + seidel contemporary in Berlin, Germany (2006, 2010, 2013, 2017). She has participated in many group shows in Europe and the United States. She won the Design Prize from the Israel culture ministry in 2016 and was awarded the Prize for the Advancement of the Arts (Israel) in 2011.

Dafna Kaffeman (born 1972, Jerusalem) is an artist and a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. She works with glass and fabrice to produce what the David Owsley Museum of Art describes as "beautiful crafted surfaces and disturbing text about aggressors and victims". She lives and works in Israel. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions, and she has won, or been nominated for, a number of international prizes and awards.