Participant Bios

Beth Krensky is Area Head and Professor of Art Teaching in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. She received her formal art training from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She was one of five founding members of the international artist collective, the Artnauts. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible. She is also a scholar of youth-created art for social change. She holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2022, Krensky was named the Utah Higher Education Art Educator of the Year and in 2019, she was selected as one of Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists. Among her academic honors, she has been awarded the Presidential Scholar, Public Service Professor, and Distinguished Teaching awards from the University of Utah. She is currently one of five performance art finalists for the 16th Arte Laguna Prize.

Maddie Blonquist Shrum is a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School (M.A.R. Visual Arts and Material Culture, 2022) and the Institute of Sacred Music. She holds a certificate in Public Humanities from Yale University and has worked at several art institutions, most recently the Yale University Art Gallery, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brigham Young University Museum of Art. She is passionate about collaboration, arts accessibility, and museum studies—all interests that have led her to pursue a career in art curation, education, and publication.

Maeera Shreiber is an Associate Professor Department of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of Singing in a Strange Land: Jewish American Poetry and Poetics (Stanford University Press, 2007) as well as numerous articles in journals such as AJS Review, Prooftexts and PMLA on poetry, religion, and Jewish thought. She held  fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the National  Humanities Endowment and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies. Recently she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Haifa University. Her most recent book, Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone is forthcoming from Fordham University Press (Fall, 2022)

Margaret Olin is a scholar and photographer. She writes on art historiography, critical theory, Jewish art, spatial practices and photography, including most recently Touching Photographs (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the co-edited (with Amos Morris-Reich) Photography and Imagination (Routledge, 2019). She is co-editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Her photographs have been exhibited in the United States, Germany, and Israel. Her recent photographic work centers on the visual culture of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Currently, she is completing,  with David Shulman, the photographic book The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine, to be published by Intellect Press. She is Senior Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies, Yale University.

Ori Z. Soltes teaches art history, theology, philosophy and political history at Georgetown University. He is former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, and has curated more than 90 exhibitions on history, ethnography and modern and contemporary art there and at other venues across the country and overseas. He is also the writer, director and host of over 30 documentary videos and the author of over 300 books, articles, exhibition catalogues, and essays on a variety of topics. Recent volumes include Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century; Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Holocaust and the Arts; Growing Up Jewish in India: Synagogues, Customs and Ceremonies from the Bene Israel to the art of Siona Benjamin;   and   Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish art and Architecture.