Lee Yanor studied art and photography for her BFA at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (1984-1988), participated in a student exchange at the Pratt Institute in New York (1987) and received a Master of Fine Arts at Université Paris 8 in 1993.
L. Yanor’s personal experience with dance early in her life is an important source of inspiration. In the 1990s she started to examine dance through the camera lens at Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville, collaborating with several choreographers to depict movements that are postponed, held without knowing or expecting the result. These “photographed improvisations” as L. Yanor called them, of dance and the human body are repeated motifs in many of her works such as Emulsion 5 (2018).
L. Yanor creates video-installations, emulsions and holograms using photography, dance, music, sound and technology. She has a special penchant for the poetic, a threshold between the bounds of reality and fantasy, past and future are blurred, enabling the repressed to appear. In Hanging (1994-2022) you can sense something beyond the seen subject in an experience of continuous present.

L. Yanor applies a photosensitive liquid to the canvas – photographic emulsion under the red light of the darkroom. It creates a sensory substance, leaving visible traces of her action as if going back to the 19th century. This technique allows her to continually re-encounter the ungraspable magic of analogue photography, creating images of subjective time that invite us on a journey, as in Emulsion 10 (2017).

The artist often uses innovative digital techniques such as multi-channel video projections on giant screens. Her images appear and disappear in a unique fashion, creating immersive narratives of rhythmic elements consisting of subject, light, colour and sound that mesmerise the viewer. These techniques come into play in her work My Body Remembers (2019), a three-channel video installation filmed in the ruins of Eden, Tel Aviv’s first cinema, including a performance featuring Ruth Amarante (b. 1963), a dancer, actress and performer from the Die Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. It explores the collective memory of this historical site and the cognitive, social and physical recollections of the cinema’s ruins.

Her work Coffee with Pina (2006) is an hour-long film depicting her meetings with the celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009). L. Yanor was among the very few who were ever invited to her studio. Following their encounters between 2002 and 2005 she created a unique portrait of P. Bausch. The film poetically intertwines images from the meetings, dance movements and performances.

L. Yanor has had some solo exhibitions around the world and participated in more than two dozen group exhibitions, screenings and festivals. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Coreografo Elettronico Award for Video-Dance, Madre Museum for Art, Naples in 2017 and the Leon Constantiner Photography Award, Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2002. Her works are in public and private collections such as the Pompidou Centre, Paris and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. She lives and works in Tel- Aviv.