Radlett artist wins prestigious Jewish academic prize at Yale

A recent graduate from Radlett has won an international Jewish academic prize presented at Yale.

Talia Misan, an artist, was presented the Jewish Academic Innovation Award at the Sinai Scholars annual Academic Symposium this weekend at Yale University.

Misan, a Manchester and Leeds graduate who grew up in North London, wrote her winning paper on “Unconscious Processes in the Production of Art: Understanding 20th Century Abstraction through Jewish Spirituality”.

It looked at the parallels between Jewish mystical thought and early 20th-century psychoanalytic theory, and how these twin trends could be understood from the work of abstract painters including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko.

Rabbi Dubi Rabinowitz, director of the Sinai Scholars Society, said she “illuminated the meaning of both Freudian conceptions of the self and the processes of world-famous artists. Her paper is deeply-researched and intellectually challenging, and she’s a worthy winner”.