ABOUT DORIT CYPIS
Dorit Cypis received her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts and has a Masters of Dispute Resolution, from Pepperdine University. Since the 1980's Dorit Cypis has employed strategies of photography, performance, installation, social sculpture to explore relationships between personal and social identity, questioning subjectivity inrelation to corporeal, social, political and psychological spaces.
Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum, Walker Art Center, Musee d'Art Contemporain at Montreal, Musee des Beaux Arts @ Bruxelles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cypis has taught on identity, representation and social relations at universities and colleges across the USA as well as in Canada, Holland, France andIsrael.
Cypis has generated extensive cultural programming including FAR (Foundation for Art Resources), 1979-1982, LosAngeles, questioning the production of art,the role of artists and the ability of art andartists to penetrate cultural domains. FAR developed partnerships between artists and public, private and educational organizations throughout Los Angeles. She founded Kulture Klub Collaborative (KKC), Twin Cities, 1992-1999, within a large social service agency, Minneapolis Youth Link, to challenge social workers to accept art as a viable discipline for crisis intervention with homeless teens. KKC developed strategies to bridge survival and inspiration, networking between homeless youth, artists and arts organizations across the Twin Cities.
Cypis' recent study of mediation and conflict transformation pro actively addresses difference, the negotiation of power and reciprocity. Her work today mines aesthetics and ethics. Cypis' museum exhibitions are immersive laboratories abstracting forms, positions, gestures, and meanings to shed light on the paradoxes of identity. Her public works and actions are social/political extensions, mediating aesthetic abstractions into living life. Founded by Cypis in 2006, Foreign Exchanges offers strategies of engagement bridging personal and cultural differences through aesthetics, conflict resolution and somatic arts, for the arts, culture, education, social service, social activism and innovative business. Foreign Exchanges represents the strengths of Cypis' work as an artist, a mediator, and an educator.
Dorit Cypis has received numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Bush, McKnight, Jerome, Ordway, Durfee Foundations, City of Los Angeles Cultural Arts Department and the Fellows of Contemporary Art. She is a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, Chair of Mediation and the Arts Committee, Southern California Mediation Association and is on the Advisory Board for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
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