Yael Dresdner is a painter and mixed media artist whose work explores memory, landscape, transformation, emotional tensions and the duality embedded within the natural world. Originally from Haifa, Israel, she has lived in the United States for more than four decades and is now based in New York City. Alongside her artistic practice, Dresdner is also a designer and breath-body-mind teacher.

Working across oil painting and pastels, Dresdner’s work often emerges from photographs and memory, transforming observed landscapes into emotionally-charged environments where perspective, scale, and spatial certainty are altered to become intentionally unstable. Through layered surfaces, luminous color and unconventional viewpoints, she invites viewers into spaces that feel immersive, fragmented, and quietly transcendent.

Her mixed media pieces explore fiber and text-based art, incorporating repurposed materials such as fiber, threads, hair, cheesecloth, earth and leather gloves. While not defining her practice as social justice, the viewer can’t help but recognize concern for the environment in her Float and Galapagos series, and women rights in her Events in the Body: Mini Torsos series. 

Dresdner’s work explores dualities found both in nature and human experience: structure and fluidity, creation and destruction, darkness and illumination. Influenced by artists such as Rembrandt, El Greco, Monet, Chaim Soutine, Tracy Emin, Marlene Dumas and Anselm Kiefer, her practice balances sensual materiality with emotional reflection.

Among others, Dresdner’s work has been included in shows at Bushwick Gallery, Art Lives Here, LIC Arts/Factory Gallery, 440 Gallery, La Bodega Gallery and Heller Museum in NYC; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Cummings Art Gallery and Yale Divinity School, CT; Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ, and Sitka Gallery, Newport, RI. Her art can be found in private and public collections, including Thomson Financial, Robert Jackson (NY State Senator) and The Chesapeake Group, New York, NY; Columbia Hospital for Women and Charlie McBride & Associates, Washington, DC.