Welcome visitors!

Thank you for coming to Studio Margalit, the online catalog of my visual art with Jewish themes, texts, and references.

I am a writer, storyteller, artist, producer, activist, and mediator, with a background in law, politics, and governance. For a long time, art and creativity seemed like separate pursuits from the political and legal - but in recent years it's become clear that the two reinforce one another - I create art to find out what is important to me, to understand... and when I understand, I can act, and advocate.

The artworks you'll find on Studio Margalit are ones that help me understand how my Jewish self is connected to my artistic self, how the intellectual and intuitive selves connect, how the words connect with the values, how it becomes part of a larger picture of humanity.

Sometimes I use the process to wrestle with myself. In recent years, I've been reconnecting with the spiritual and religious components of my Jewishness, and also opening myself up to the questions that have long-lingered and given me pause in that religious connection. Because I was raised with Jewish religious observance as an important part of family and communal life, I feel at home in it; yet I've also felt displaced by certain rituals, laws, and theological aspects of the traditions - particularly with regard to gender, but also much more.

This led to many years of disconnect from Jewish religious experiences (aside from holidays with family). But in the past couple of years, I've felt a pressing need to set out for a spiritual home, to integrate aspects of the religious with the rest of my life. So I've experimented with new ways of practicing, and new paths for creating, bringing me closer to my questions, looking for new answers and integrations and changes, and it is becoming a marvelous path.

It is a marvelous path, and it is also a path of dissent, and resistance. In putting together this website, I am reminded that each piece of work was created with a message for peace, and a message of opposition to the forces that are barriers to peace - whether global, political, or internal. Peace, meaning wholeness, to live together in justice, love, compassion, humanity, dignity, creativity.

Thank you for taking a look at the fruits of these efforts over the years.

I hope you enjoy what you see.

And please be in touch if you'd like to discuss ways we can create together.

B'Shalom, in peace,
Talia Werber