Michal Ness
WriterPerformance artist
Creation has never required standing.
From “Things Exist but Do Not Count” →
Michal Ness is a writer and performance artist. Her essays and poems start somewhere small and physical, a near-miss on the highway, a painting that loses its attribution, a child asleep in the next room, and follow it into Tanya, Talmud and Chassidus, and into Freud, Girard and Bourdieu.
She writes in the first person and turns the scrutiny on herself first. The pieces take up recognition and being seen, faith and its explanations, appetite and restraint, marriage, motherhood, and Jewish life after October 7.
She grew up in Haifa in a family of Soviet-Jewish immigrants and now lives in South Florida with her husband and their seven children. Her performance work, still taking shape, will live on this site alongside the writing.
Writing
A selection of essays, poems, letters and polemics. Numbers follow Michal’s own archive, oldest to newest.
Selected from an archive of 87 pieces, with more added as they are written.
Performance
Video of Michal’s performance work will appear here.