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Devora Neumark's interdisciplinary art practice includes performance, sound and photography installations, public commissions, storytelling, and community art. An emphasis on active listening and the willingness to risk vulnerability as strength are integral to her art, teaching, and community organizing. Her street interventions are characterized by a direct sharing and exchange with the individuals who come across it (mostly incidentally), and who chose to approach / witness / participate. Since 1989, she has been the recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council and The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She has received financial support from the Faculty Development Fund of Goddard College and the Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund.
Neumark is also co-director of Engrenage Noir's LEVIER Programs that aim to encourage connections between artistic practice and social responsibility. LEVIER’s goals are to facilitate relationships between artists and community groups with an emphasis on holistic individual and collective artistic practices of all kinds concerned with social responsibility and the equitable distribution of resources.
In 1995, Neumark was the initiator and co-organizer (with Regine Basha) of the international symposium Visual Art and Jewish Identities: A Contemporary Experience held at Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts. More recently Neumark initiated and co-organized (with Loren Lerner and pk langshaw) Public Art as Social Intervention... But now I have to speak: testimonies of trauma resilience and change, a Montreal-based project held at Concordia University which included an interdisciplinary three day symposium, a series of artistic interventions, and an extensive website.
Between 1995 and June of 1999, Neumark served as Vice President of Auberge Shalom...pour femmes, Canada's first kosher crisis-intervention centre and shelter for women victims of conjugal violence. She currently is a faculty member of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College (Vermont). As a frequent lecturer, she has addressed a wide-variety of audiences, speaking about engaged art practice; the conditions of home in the aftermath of cultural oppression and related traumas; the authority of memory and formations of identity; and conflict resolution and healing with/through creative transformation. She is a dialogue convener with the Montreal Dialogue Group and a member of ShalomSalaam.
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