User:RabinowitzM1

Monica Rabinowitz (born 1968) is an American artist and lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. She often uses photography, sound, and installation in her work.

Life and work
Monica Rabinowitz was born in New York City, USA and grew up in Roslyn Heights, Long Island. She attended the State University of New York at Albany and graduated in 1990 with a BA in Sociology. Later that year, she moved to London, England, studied Youth & Community Work at Brunel University and worked as a youth arts worker. In 1995, she attended City and Islington College to study art and design and worked as an apprentice set designer with the Tavistock Repertory Company at the Tower Theatre in Canonbury. Rabinowitz returned to the US in 1998 and received her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College in 2002. Rabinowitz has taught photography, studio art, and art history in higher and secondary education.

Rabinowitz's work often explores identity and its performative elements. She is interested in the ways that culture impacts and shapes identity and examines themes of memory, Judaism, and the family through viewer interactivity. Much of Rabinowitz's subject matter is experienced through visual and oral storytelling, weaving personal narratives into elaborate and technical installations. One example is her installation, King's Highway & 26th Street, where she displays the interior of a hospital room, complete with hospital bed and IV pole. Rabinowitz re-creates a scene from her paternal grandmother's death bed, disguising herself as each of her family members and printing these larger-than-life characters onto opposing hospital privacy screens. Layered audio can be heard from headphones hanging off the IV pole; a humorous dialogue between these family members. When viewers walk into the space, the only ambient sound that can be heard is that of a respirator.

Rabinowitz has participated in solo and group exhibitions in New York and New England. In 2009, Rabinowitz exhibited her pivotal one woman installation Line #5 - Knyazhevo in the Incubator Project Space of the University of Massachusetts' Hampden Gallery. This work features a purpose-built tram car, video, and constructed photographic scenes from her maternal grandmother's escape from Sofia, Bulgaria during World War II. Layered sounds of tram noises, a Bulgarian Jewish survivor, and voices reciting the Bulgarian Law for Defense of the Nation can be heard.