Dana Ramon Kapelian was born in 1963 in Haifa, Israel.
Leaving for Europe and the USA in 1983, she studied from 1986 to 1988 at the San Francisco Art Institute, winning a Merit Scholarship and the Sobel Scholarship. She uses various techniques such as painting, engraving, installations, photography and writing to explore human socio-political conditions.
Moving to France in 1989, she spent the following 20 years in Paris, showing her paintings
and installations in various solo and group shows in France, Germany and Brazil.
She started to question the representation of women and their role in society with the installation serial «Housewives» based on a “mise en scène” of dolls in boxes and cages showing life stories inspired by excerpts from newspapers.
This installation was presented at the La Gaité Lyrique in Paris as well at the Museu da Republica in Rio de Janeiro where she installed cages and boxes on the ex dictator Vargas' council table.
From 2007 to 2009 she was the art director and iconographer of the successful book « 100,000 Years of Beauty », a 5-volume history of humanity’s evolving attitudes to beauty, from prehistory to the twenty-first century, written by 300 contributors from 35 countries, published by Editions Gallimard and Babylone, with the L'Oréal Foundation.
Moving to South Korea in 2010, she showed her new photographic work in solo exhibitions.
In 2011, she started interviewing and taking portraits for her new book project « My Korean Women - From Tradition to Self-reinvention » - A collection of 60 portraits of Korean women with photographs and texts issued from these exchanges.
The book is published by Noonbit Editions during spring 2014.
This book is another step towards the human approach characterizing Dana Ramon Kapelian’s work, providing a unique vision of the changes in women’s living conditions in contemporary Korean society through the sensitive eyes and mind of a foreign artist.
