Eliana Light
Eliana Light has used her passion for music and Jewish education to engage children and adults in a relationship with the divine. Light started her career early, serving as education director at Bible Raps, an organization that combines hip-hop and Torah stories to reflect contemporary Jewish identity, and leading family services at Temple B’nai Abraham in Massachusetts while still a college student. In early 2013 she ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to produce her first album, A New Light. After graduating from Brandeis University later that year with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she served as director of music education at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York from 2014 to 2017, teaching music to children of all ages and helping kids prepare for bar and bat mitzvahs. Meanwhile she continued her career as a musician, creating a second album, Eliana Sings (About Jewish Things!). Her third album, s*ngs ab-ut g?d, was released in 2020 and her fourth, Orah Hi, in 2023. In 2016 she earned a master’s degree in experiential Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 2017 she became music educator at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York, serving for a year before shifting her focus to full-time art creation and consulting. In 2018, Light began directing an initiative called The G!D Project, which focuses on creating accessible conversations about spirituality and the divine through ritual, text, and song. In 2021, she founded The Light Lab, an organization that offers consulting, professional development, and programming about creating accessible practices for prayer and liturgy. Light was named to Jewish Week’s 36 under 36 list in 2019.