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Michelle is an artist and designer living in New York City. Michelle Shofet is co-founder of Nocturnal Medicine–an art and design studio that creates experiences, spaces & media for working through the social & emotional challenges of radical environmental change. Her research interests include themes of abject landscapes, cultural memory and identity politics. She earned her Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and approaches her research through the lens of the built environment.
Her curiosity about Poland was sparked during the Humanity in Action Fellowship in Warsaw in the summer of 2011, where her encounters with alternative memorials precipitated a desire to return and ask more questions. The daughter of Iranian-Jewish immigrants, she has long pursued diasporic narratives as a way of connecting with her heritage.
Updated October 2019
More from Michelle Shofet
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Humanity in Action Announces More Recipients of 2019 Grant Competition
Humanity in Action is pleased to share three of the 11 projects that will receive a grant for the "Addressing Antisemitism" campaign.
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2011 Warsaw Fellowship Blog
During the 2011 Warsaw Fellowship, our Fellows wrote daily blogs of their experiences during the Fellowship. Read their reflections here.
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Space & Memory: The Presence of Jewish Absence in Poland's Contemporary Landscape
Space & Memory: The Presence of Jewish Absence in Poland's Contemporary Landscape examined alternative modes of remembering the Holocaust and Jewish life throughout the landscape of Poland.
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An Index of Encounters
Palimpsests are often imperfectly erased. Layer after layer, when a new growth is formed, vestiges of the past are left behind. Senior Fellow Michelle Shofet's and Senior Fellow Marissa Schneiderman's curiosity moved them to seek out these traces—physical, emotional, psychological, and cultural. ŻYD: An Index of Encounters, is the result.
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Space & Memory: The Presence of Jewish Absence in Poland's Contemporary Landscape
Humanity in Action Senior Fellows Łukasz Posłuszny, Michelle Shofet, and Marissa Sophie Schneiderman created this project, sought to re-conceptualize the ways of remembering the war and the Holocaust, and to discuss social aesthetics of monuments and alternative forms of memory in the context of trauma, and on the other hand it also promoted tolerance among young people and a desire to fight anti-Semitism.