Balakirsky-Katz Maya

Maya Balakirsky Katz joined the Jewish art faculty at Bar-Ilan from Touro College in Manhattan, where she taught since 1998 and chaired the art history department. In the United States, Professor Katz received her PhD from Bryn Mawr College and a Doctorate in Psychoanalysis from the NJ Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis. Her research focuses on the intersection between religion and visual culture and the relationship between disciplinary formation and academic production in modern Jewish history in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, the Soviet Union, and North America. She is a co-editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Her book The Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge, 2010) explored the bottom-up creation and dissemination of the rebbe’s image and legacy. Her book Drawing the Iron Curtain (Rutgers, 2016) on the Jewish labor in the Soviet animation industry focused on communal collaborations between writers, artists, patrons, and editors and horizontal structures in state-sponsored cultural production. Since coming to Bar Ilan in 2019, Katz has published the volume Intersections between Jews & Media (Brill, 2020) and is currently completing her volume on Freud, religion, and the birth of the psychoanalytic periodical (Cambridge, 2022).