b.h. Yael is a Toronto-based filmmaker, video and installation artist. She is Professor of Integrated Media at OCAD University, past Chair of Senate and past Assistant Dean.

Yael’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally and has shown in various settings, from festivals to galleries to community and activist groups, as well as various educational venues. Her work has been purchased by many universities and she is a recipient of numerous arts grants including a Chalmers Fellowship award. Her essay film Trading the Future won the Audience Award at the Ecofilms festival in Rhodes, Greece.

Yael’s films and installations have dealt with the many intersections of identity and family; they have focused on activist initiatives in Palestine/Israel, as well as apocalypse, geopolitical and environmental urgencies. Select titles include: Fresh Blood, A Consideration of Belonging; In the Middle of the Street; and Palestine Trilogy. Collaborative and collective projects include Spontaneous Combustion; the Olive Project by the Hardpressed Collective; BlahBlahBlah: Re(viewing) Quebec; and the Approximations series, with Johanna Householder, short works examining filmic representations of gender. The first of these, titled The Mission, is a shot-for-shot recreation, edited in camera, of the opening scene of Francis Coppola's 1979 landmark, Apocalypse Now. The Mission is a comedic piece which calls into question the gendering of redemption. A second piece, December 31, 2000, is based on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. December 31, 2000 is an ironic and humorous reversal of domesticity and of a gendered apocalypse, pointing to the failure of the future.

Yael has also programmed arts lectures and media screenings, especially the Art Creates Change series at OCADU. She has worked in the sphere of independent film and video since the mid 1980's.
As a past Coordinator of Programming at the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Yael was involved in the development of that festival in its first years; she also developed workshops and selected programming at Trinity Square Video.

In past, Yael has served on the Boards of Northern Visions (Images festival) and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and on the Steering Committee of the Centre for Media and Culture in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She has worked on programming committees, such as A Space Gallery and the Euclid Theatre, and has sat on many arts council juries.

Yael premiered Lessons for Polygamists, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, at the Images festival in April 2017. No Lies, a one-minute short and silent version won the Most Original Film by a Local Female Director award at the 2016 Toronto Urban Film Festival and first prize at the 2018 Gotta Minute Film Festival in Edmonton. She has recently completed a memoir on this family story. Look for Mike Hoolboom’s edited book, Family States, on Yael’s work (2021), available at https://www.mikehoolboom.com/thenewsite/docs/BHYael-FamilyStates.pdf

Artist Code: 264