Jennifer Levine is a New York City-born, multidisciplinary artist and Jewish educator working across mediums and genres including mural art, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. All of a piece–her art practice does not exist without her work in education and vice-versa.

Raised by non-religious parents, as a child, she attended the Workman’s Circle “Shula”-- a secular Jewish cultural school rooted in social justice where she was to have an experience that profoundly affected the course of her life’s work. Here she learned about the Holocaust and at graduation, her class performed a play about the Children of Terezin. Jennifer memorized and recited “The Last Butterfly,” a poem written by Pavel Friedmann, a child in Theresienstadt who was deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

What grew from this early experience of creating art to process historical trauma later became the central thesis of all her work. She went on to complete multiple degrees in Jewish spiritual and cultural education, and held roles as an educator and administrator for 25 years -- all while pursuing artmaking as a self-taught artist. She began making puppets to teach children their first lessons in Hebrew and then graduated from the San Francisco School of Circus Arts in their renowned Clown Conservatory and worked as a puppeteer. She has performed works at the Jewish Museum, NY, and at the International Fringe Festival, NY. She founded and currently runs the not-for-profit Peace Garden Song and Mural Project, an arts program for children that combines mural-making, music and mindfulness.

In 2022 Levine received her MFA from SUNY/New Paltz. In a class on the Bauhaus she rediscovered Friedl Decker-Brandeis, the underrecognized female artist and teacher who taught art to the children of Terezin and before being deported to Auschwitz in 1944, along with most of her students, Decker-Brandeis hid 5000 of the children’s works in 2 suitcases in one of the children’s dorms. That body of work is now in the permanent collection of The Jewish Museum in Prague and has travelled the world numerous times. Decker-Brandeis is now being recognized as a seminal figure in the development of the field of Art Therapy.

Levine’s MFA thesis was titled, “Layers of Self: an unfolding conversation through painting, encaustics and doll making.” Currently she is a postgraduate student at the New York Studio School, NY, with a focus on painting. Levine’s teaching curriculum incorporates Decker-Brandeis’ expressive arts pedagogy, and uses the Children’s Art of Terezin to give her young students an experience of art-making as a trauma response, both in terms of integrating Holocaust history into the psyche, and as a tool for coping with life’s challenges.

Jennifer Levine’s message in the classroom as well as in her art practice is empathy and empowerment. In the studio she addresses struggles in our society through a metaphorical circus where outsiders are always welcome. Her figures include animal/human hybrid deities, and the ever present elephant which represents memory and hope. She uses text, in poem form– in squiggly designs throughout her compositions. Sometimes in Hebrew or Yiddish – the words may be her own or favorite quotes from history, such as Rumi. For Jennifer, art-making and teaching are a form of prayer that has the capacity to transform society.