Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha L. Ettinger was born in 1948 in Tel Aviv

Bracha Lichtenberg was born in Tel Aviv on 23 March 1948 to Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland. She grew up in Kiryat Shalom in south Tel Aviv. Her father, Uziel Lichtenberg, was among the founders of the Massuah institute and of Kibbutz Nitzanim.

She served in the Israeli Air Force and was wounded during a 1967 rescue operation. She earned an M.A. in clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she worked as an assistant to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. From 1975 to 1979 she trained in London, including at the London Centre for Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Clinic.

She returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. In 1981 she moved to Paris to work as an artist, though she never formally studied art. She received a D.E.A. in psychoanalysis from Paris VII in 1987 and a Ph.D. in aesthetics from Paris VIII in 1996.

Her paintings, drawings and notebooks deal with trauma, memory, the Shoah and the feminine. She has shown work at the Pompidou Centre, the Israel Museum and the Istanbul and Kochi-Muziris biennials. She is a professor at the European Graduate School and at GCAS.

In 2023 she resigned from the committee choosing the artistic director of Documenta 2027. In 2024 she won the Beki Dekel prize for an Israeli artist.