Photos and quotes from BIMA participants.

BIMA Interns

The BIMA internship is designed for emerging artists interested in learning and practicing arts education in a creative, diverse Jewish community. BIMA interns work with the arts faculty in one of the arts majors. They also live in the dorms with the BIMA participants and share responsibility with the Community Educators for all aspects of residential life.

Meet the 2012 BIMA Interns

Michelle Bentsman (Visual Arts) is a fourth year at the University of Chicago, where she is majoring in Fundamentals: Issues and Texts and minoring in Visual Arts. Her studies focus on the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. Off campus, she teaches at Congregation Rodfei Zedek's Family Institute of Jewish Living and Learning, creating art projects, sharing stories, and celebrating Judaism with a variety of age groups. She runs a student organization called Beats & Pieces, which curates art and music exhibitions in Hyde Park and will be throwing a Graffiti Festival on campus this spring. Michelle has painted and installed murals across the University of Chicago campus for the annual Festival of the Arts, planned and directed twenty college students in the painting of a mural at a Jewish school on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and painted upon the walls of a synagogue classroom for children in Hyde Park. She is the arts editor and cover artist for Makom, the University of Chicago's undergraduate journal of Jewish thought. Michelle is delighted to be joining the BIMA community for a summer of thoughtful spiritual and artistic engagement. 

Gabriella Feingold (Theater) is a rising Junior at Brandeis University and is planning an interdisciplinary major in Applied Theatre and Social Change and a Creative Writing minor. She is the oldest of four and grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. In her free time, she likes to journal, write poetry, and sing Sara Bareilles (among others). She is active in the arts community at Brandeis and has been the musical director of Manginah, Brandeis' Premier Co-ed Jewish A Cappella Group, this past year. Her favorite mantra is "live in the moment" and she looks forward to creating many of those moments at BIMA this summer!

Allie Fox (Choral Music) is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in Music History with a vocal performance concentration and minoring in Jewish Studies. Allie has been singing for as long as she can remember, and has performed in a variety of choral groups since she was in third grade. She currently sings in Hofstra University’s Chamber Singers, Chorale, and Musicum Collegium. Additionally, she is co-founder of Hofstra’s only Jewish a Cappella group, Chai Notes. Her most exciting choral memory thus far has been singing with one of her choirs in Carnegie Hall in New York City. In addition to singing, Allie absolutely loves learning about Judaism and exploring what the religion means to her. Her life-long dream is to become a Cantor. Allie is a BIMA choral music alumna (summers 2007 and 2008) and absolutely cannot wait to spend her summer at BIMA again! 

Amy Kaldor (Dance) is a Certified Personal Trainer and has completed her Bachelor of Arts with a Specialized Honours Degree in Kinesiology at York University in Toronto, Canada.  This past year she has completed her Bachelor of Education at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.  Amy has been dancing for over 20 years and has competed in tap, jazz, ballet and contemporary dance.  Over the past 5 years Amy has attended many dance workshops and continued her dance education in university where she took specialized classes in Jazz, Ballroom and African dancing.  She looks forward to a summer filled with creativity and dance at BIMA this summer.
Lilly Schneider (Writing) graduated from Emerson College last May with honors, earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and completing two final theses. She has written for both print and online publications; most currently, her fiction is forthcoming online in The Landing, a magazine/writer's collective she formed with college writer friends. After college she returned to the island outside Seattle where she grew up, living and working on an organic farm, making coffee and small talk and big talk at a bakery, and filling many yellow-paged notebooks with short stories in her attic room. (She thinks yellow pages are more friendly than white ones.) She plans to begin an MFA in fiction within the next two to three years and become a professor of creative writing. But before that: publish some stories, travel the world, live in her birthplace of San Francisco, and dive into a summer of learning and collective creativity at BIMA!