Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman

he/him, Assistant Professor in Socially Engaged Art

About

PhD, Contemporary Art, Simon Fraser University, in-progress

MFA, Literary Art, Brown University, 2012

BFA, Writing for Media, Publication and Performance, Pratt Institute, 2009

Areas of Interest: artistic research; poetry and poetics; place-responsive, participatory, installation, social practice, public, and performance art; experimental theatre and film; memory studies; critical local history; folklore; community research; critical Jewish studies and its intersections; difficult solidarities.

Courses offered:  FAIR 336V Durational Contemplation; FAIR 201 Artistic Research; FAIR 202A Installing Memory; FAIR 337 Berlin: City of Remembering and Forgetting (Global Learning Program); FAIR 336V Collective Practice; FAIR 336V Walking in Ethnocidal Places; FAIR 336V Constructing Intervention.

ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNIDERMAN is a fourth generation Ashkenazi-American from Philadelphia (US) and other places in the traditional territory of the Lenape diaspora, with ancestral ties to eradicated Jewish communities in Warsaw, Jaroslaw and Rzeszów (PL), Chișinău (MLD), Dnipro (UKR), and Seirijai (LITH). As an artist, curator, teacher, and poet, he helps make interventions, essays, performances, poems, films, and installations with/in overwritten and denied places and materials, tracing local experience to and from entangled catastrophes. His contributions establish difficult situations for durational contemplation and vernacular rites, manifesting a quiet language of intense proximity over time by tending accidents, anxieties, and memory.

Recent projects include the durational contemplation Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee (2016-19); the film Night Herons (2021), recipient of the 2024 ING Polish Art Foundation Main Prize, created with Joanna Rajkowska; the public memorial project Wierzba Estery / Esther's Willow (2018- ) created with Katarzyna Sala and Marta Sala; يان الصعود الى السماء Flight Manifesto (2019-2024), a silent walk on the Nooksack River and sonic composition created with Dirar Kalash, Cascadia Deaf Nation et al.; and an exilic memorial for Zagros Axa Xeyal Kirin Imagined Land خاکی خەیاڵکراو created with Nastaran Saremy. These and other works have been exhibited or supported by institutions such as Canadian Kurdish Community Center, FestivALT, House of Taswir, Municipal Public Library in Chrzanów, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum of the Commons, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, steirischer herbst, Urban Memory Foundation, Wonder Cabinet, and Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. 

Sniderman's visual and performance art, poems, art criticism, and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, monographs, and exhibition catalogues including L'Internationale Online (2025), The Berlin Left (2024), Art Unlimited (2024), Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology (2023), The Hopkins Review (2023), Visible Binary (2022), Zachęta Online Magazine (2021), Paranoia TV (2021), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020), The Offing (2019), The Volta (2015), and Emergency Index Vol. 3 (2013). In 2023-24, he served as Visiting Professor at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext (Institute for Art in Context), Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) Berlin.