Roee Rosen, Prof.

Roee Rosen is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. He is known for his multilayered and provocative work which often challenges the divides between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and erotica.

Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as a book (Sweet Sweat, Sternberg Press, 2009), and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005).

Rosen’s second major fictive persona, Maxim Komar-Myshkin, was supposedly a Russian poet and artist whose magnum opus,Vladimir’s Night (Sternberg Press, 2014), is an album of images and verse wherein animism converges violently with current Russian politics. The fiction expanded to include an entire collective of like-minded ex-Soviet artists, as well as their manifesto.

In 2010 Rosen created two films, Hilarious, a dysfunctional standup monologue, and Out, in which a BDSM session becomes a political exorcism. Out premiered at the Venice film festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film. The film was also shortlisted for the European Academy award.

Rosen’s film, The Dust Channel was co-produced by Documenta 14, where it was exhibited along with two historical text and image installations, The Blind Merchant (1989–1991), an artist book retelling Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice focusing on the figure of Shylock and Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), a work that stirred a political scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum.

Several retrospectives of Rosen’s cinema were held, among them at the Oberhausen film festival (2012), and FICUNAM festival, Mexico City (2018). In 2018 an expansive one person exhibition was held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, entitled Histoires dans le pénombre. The exhibition also included a full film survey.

In 2022 Rosen released Kafka For Kids, a feature-length musical comedy combining fiction, animation and political and legal documentary elements. Rosen’s book Lucy is Sick (forthcoming, 2025), tackles cancer in the guise of a coloring book. Five years in the making, its first chapters were published by Steirischer Herbst in 2020.

Rosen’s recent expansive solo exhibition in Germany was held at Kunstverein Hannover, entitled The Kafka Companion to Wellness (November 2024 – January 2025). His latest published books are The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Roee Rosen (Distanz and KVH, 2024), and the Hebrew edition of Lucy is Sick (Pardes Publishing, 2024).

Rosen is a professor at the Midrasha – Faculty of the Arts, at the Beit Berl College, in Israel.