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Bio
Melissa Shiff is a video, performance, and installation artist who specializes in utilizing Jewish myths, symbols and rituals in the service of social justice and activism as well as engaging with issues of cultural memory.
Her highly acclaimed work ARK was the keynote project for the Jewish Museum in Prague's centennial year celebration in 2006. ARK is an outdoor video sculpture that that measures 4.5-meter high.
For the group show, Off the Wall: Artists at Work, at The Jewish Museum NY (Spring 2008) she was commissioned to create JAMS, the Jewish Animated Mandala Series, animating the Museum’s Judaica collection.
Her real life performance art Postmodern Jewish Wedding has been exhibited around the world, including the Spanish Synagogue at the Jewish Museum in Prague, (Spring 2006), Off the Wall: Artists at Work at The Jewish Museum NY, ( Spring 2008) and The Center for Jewish History as part of the colloquium Objects of Affection: The Jewish Wedding in Media and Material (Spring 2008). An earlier version of the film screened at many international Jewish film festivals including, Buenos Aires, Toronto and Seattle.
In the fall of 2007 Shiff created Iconoclash, an interactive multi media rave with a 40 foot screen that was hung in one of Toronto’s main downtown parks. This project was commissioned by the City of Toronto for the all night art event Nuit Blanche.
Other works that rethink, reinvent and reinvigorate Jewish ritual include Gender Cuts/The Jew Under the Knife (2000), a feminist inquiry into the ritual of circumcision; Times Square Seder: Featuring the Matzoh Ball Soup Kitchen (2002), a multi-media art activist event for the homeless featuring Elijah Chair and Passover Projections , and her art activist Passover endeavor The Medium is the Matzo (2005) which initiated the launch of her online store JAP: Jewish Art Projects, Politics, Products where her Crush Oppression Matzo Pillows are on sale to help fight hunger.
Her video sculpture Elijah Chair is in the permanent collection of The Jewish Museum in New York where it was featured in a special exhibition at the Goodkind Media Gallery, (Spring 2004).
She also collaborated with Louis Kaplan on Looking for Ararat (2003), an imaginary Jewish homelands video project.
Shiff received her artistic training at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and holds a degree from Tufts University. She has given public lectures about her artwork at such institutions as The Jewish Museum and Brandeis University among others.
Her work has been reviewed in art and scholarly journals such as Afterimage, The Prague Post, C Magazine, and Nashim, and most recently by Bruce Jenkins, Dean of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Curator the Museum Journal, who compared her art to the work of Chantal Ackerman, Bill Viola and Mary Lucier.