About 
"Eroding and Evolving–Tribal" by Hagit Cohen
LABA BAY AREA came about as a result of the LABA-shaped hole in her heart Elissa Strauss had after moving from New York to the Bay Area. Elissa, who from 2010-2017 co-directed LABA NY with Ronit Muszkabllit, wanted to bring LABA to the Bay Area for herself–she missed the community, conversation, text and art. Though she also saw that there was a need in the Bay Area for a home for culture-makers to come together and explore Jewish texts and ideas, in that open-minded, freewheeling LABA-style setting. LABA provides a space and context to do this wrestling, and find new pathways of meaning and connection to the Jewish tradition and other Jewish and Jew-ish like-minded seekers.
LABA BAY AREA began as LABA East Bay, a program of the JCC East Bay in Berkeley from 2019-2022, made possible with generous funding from Anne Germanacos’s Firehouse Fund: Cultivating Sparks. After three years of successful incubation, and the guidance of JCC EB program director Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud, LABA BAY AREA expanded into a Bay Area-wide program in 2023.
Today, the program’s home is the Firehouse, in San Francisco. The Firehouse is a real place located in San Francisco. It’s also a place for the imagination, where artists, activists and educators are invited to be in conversation with one another and the world. In person, online and through their creations and activities, residents embody varieties of creative community.
Contact LABA BAY AREA at [email protected]
Theme
"Homeland" by Lila Glenn Rimalovski
THE 2025 THEME FOR LABA IS CHANGE.
Our relationship with change reaches in two, oppositional directions. We fear change, loathe change, long to keep things as they are or reverse things to how they used to be. We desire to return to mythical homelands, to gardens, our childhoods, to the people and communities and places we knew before change happened. And yet, what is our lives if not constant change, or the pursuit of constant change? The, to borrow from our Buddhist friends, permanence of impermanence? Changes in our moods, changes in our bodies, changes in our levels of enlightenment, sometimes premeditated, sometimes sought out through the embrace of new experiences. We subject ourselves to unpredictability with the hope that we will be changed, if only for this moment, if only forever.
As culture-makers, we simultaneously pursue change of words, materials, musical notes, ideas, sensibilities, and warn others of easy, shallow change. Change, real change, is never so simple. In Jewish culture, we also toggle between a resistance to change and embrace of constant flux – laws, ideas, customs, feelings are simultaneously fixed and malleable, altered through careful deliberations as well as dreams and intuitions. Medieval scholar Maimonides believed the Torah was immutable. Meanwhile, Spanish Jewish mystics believed that truth was mutable, and every era demands a new approach to the Torah.
This year at LABA we will dive into the paradoxes of change in our collective souls and individual creative practices. Most importantly, we’ll have a great time talking, eating, drinking, learning, and laughing in the lush, fertile, free-flowing, romantic, super-serious, and endlessly playful environment of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
We invite you to look within, or without, be still, or be active, and interrogate change in your minds and your work.
Fellows
"Advanced Camouflage Techniques for the Built Environment" by Danielle Freiman
News
"Everything is at least three things: the one you see, the one you think you know and the one you remember" by Amy TrachtenbergA big welcome to the 2025 LABA BAY AREA CHANGE fellows and our new LABA BAY AREA scholar, Tova Birnbaum.
And congratulations to the 2024 LABA BAY AREA fellows for their sold-out NIGHT exhibition and showcase. Check out photographs here.
Events
Save the date for the second annual LABA BAY AREA + Chochmat Halev Tikkun Leil Shavout.
Sunday June 1, 2025.
FELLOWS
HILA AMRAM
Laba Process/Project
HILA AMRAM
Hila Amram is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Through sculpture, video, and mixed media, her work explores the intersections of nature, science, and art. She addresses the profound impact of human activities on the natural world. Amram has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and major institutions worldwide.
hilamram.com
MICHELLE BRENNER
Laba Process/Project
Michelle Brenner is an artist, educator, art historian, and writer working primarily in drawn media with a focus on portraiture. She is also a mother, and is particularly interested in how we are shaped by our relationships and seen differently within the contexts of those relationships, our community, and our phase of life. Her portraits seek to explore the multiple, overlapping identities we take on in our different worlds; as children, parents, siblings, helpers, mentors, and students.
MAYA DA LA ROSA-COHEN
Laba Process/Project
Maya De La Rosa-Cohen (she/her) is a writer and playwright from San Francisco who believes in the power of storytelling to build ongoing forms of connection and empathy, especially in times of fear and division. Her most recent play, The First Three, based on the true story of her parents’ legal battle to become the first queer family in California to share equal parenthood, premiered at the Brava Theatre during the 2024 New Roots Theater Festival. Previous fellowships and residencies include the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company’s Creator’s Lab and Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency Lab.
SAMANTHA GRANT
Laba Process/Project
With an eye for beauty and a lust for meaning, Samantha Grant is an award-winning multi-disciplinary filmmaker, artist, journalist, and educator who harnesses the power of potent storytelling to inspire change on a broad scale by moving people, emotionally and intellectually, into new ways of thinking.
GENEVIEVE GREINETZ
Laba Process/Project
Genevieve Greinetz is a writer and rabbi living in San Francisco, CA. Her poetry is published in various journals and her first full-length collection, Animals Are Shouting Down From The Sky, comes out in Spring 2025. She loves bodies of water, swimming, time outside, and laughter.
CHEL MANDELL
Laba Process/Project
Rabbi Chel Mandell (they/them) is the founder and creative director of the Tzimtzum community in Santa Cruz, which centers queer, trans, and gender-expansive identities alongside the Jewish diasporic experience. They teach and direct the Graduate level certificate in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. With an interdisciplinary MFA from Sierra Nevada University and a background in ceramics, Chel’s work explores the intersections of their trans identity, surfing, and spirituality, drawing inspiration from both Bay Area skate/surf culture and Jewish communities.
CHANCE REINIESCH
Laba Process/Project
Chance Reiniesch is a filmmaker, photographer, musician and sound artist whose work is grounded in ethical modes of creation, sincerity and community. With an expansive portfolio exploring environmental topics, spiritual practice, queer identity and ancestral wisdom, he recognizes art as inherently political and representative whilst bending genres of fiction, documentary and experimentalism. Frequently moving between visual and auditory mediums (and often the combination of the two), his most recent artistic works include the Places to Disappear EP and the short documentary, “The Art of Dunsmuir.”
RONIT SHALEM
Laba Process/Project
Ronit Shalem, a Bay Area contemporary artist originally from Israel, thrives on color, culture & community. Shalem creates evocative artworks from intricate drawings to textural installation art. With a background in graphic design, her art has been showcased in solo exhibitions, including Madsen Contemporary (2023), JCC Palo Alto (2022), TLV Artist House, IL (2018), Man and the Living World Museum, IL (2014), and Dea-Orh Gallery, Czech Republic (2014).
ARI SALOMON
Laba Process/Project
Ari Salomon, a San Francisco-based fine art photographer, reimagines the performative act of uncovering candid moments, blending them with conceptual perspectives that challenge traditional narratives. His work delves into how photography can reveal the nature and limitations of human perception. Salomon has exhibited widely across the USA and internationally, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, and Poland.
LIV SHAFFER
Laba Process/Project
Liv Schaffer is a dance artist and educator with a focus on intergenerational practice. She has performed with AXIS Dance Company, DanceWorks Chicago, Robert Moses’ Kin, and the Dance Exchange. Liv is a Community Engagement Artist with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and on faculty at the University of San Francisco’s Performing Arts & Social Justice department, where she teaches contemporary technique and directs an on campus intergenerational dance company, Dance Generators.