Rachel Wischnitzer was a pioneer in the fields of Jewish art history and synagogue architecture. Her wide-ranging scholarship included books, articles, book reviews, and exhibition catalogs on ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish art. The breadth of her contributions to the history of Jewish art and architecture is exemplified in her lifelong dedication to her work.

Among art lovers in Israel and in the inner circles of artists, Aviva Uri is considered a legend who shaped generations of artists in Israel. Born in Safed, Uri was known for her abstract scribbles that expressed anxiety and distress, as well as her later depictions of mourning, death, and destruction. In 1952, she received the Dizengoff Prize and in 1957 she exhibited her work at the Tel Aviv Museum. 

Doris May Ulmann was a photographer who elevated photography to a fine art form, as she captured celebrities of her day, doctors, black plantation workers, and the rural poor of Appalachia. Born in New York in 1882, Ulman rose to become a prominent photographer of all aspects of American life and is credited with producing the most extensive documentation of southern plantation life in her work.

Marie Trommer was an early twentieth-century writer, poet, artist, art critic, and contributor to American Jewish newspapers. After attending the Cooper Union Art School, Trommer became known for her contributions to Jewish newspapers, her poetry, and her oil and watercolor paintings. She was a member of the Creative Writers Group, Society of Independent Artists, and Art Alliance of America. 

From the moment she arrived in the city in 1912 until the day she died in 1980, Anna Ticho lovingly portrayed Jerusalem in paint, pen and ink, charcoal, pastel, and pencil. Her works have been shown around Israel and abroad, and she has received numerous honorary titles and awards. She bequeathed her home, Ticho House, to the Israel Museum to be used as a site for exhibitions and cultural events.

Florine Stettheimer's paintings are lively, diarylike accounts of her life and acute examinations of upper-class ways in New York between the wars. Her decorative style offered an alternative to prevailing modes of contemporary modernist painting. Through her work, she criticized the high-mindedness of modern art and the course of modern life. 

Grete Stern was one of the founders of Argentina’s modern photography. After studying photography in bohemian Berlin and at the legendary Bauhaus School, Stern developed an unconventional approach to photography, including advertisement collages and studies with crystals, objects, and still-lifes. Between 1935 and 1981 Stern was an influential artistic presence in Argentina, known for her photographic work, graphic design, and teaching.  

Irma Stern was a remarkably prolific artist, holding more than a hundred solo exhibitions. It took time for Stern's espousal of modernism, color, and rhythm to find acceptance in the conservative art world of South Africa. After her death, the Irma Stern Museum, administered by the University of Cape Town, was opened.

Mollie Steimer earned nationwide attention for her refusal to compromise her anarchist beliefs during the widely publicized 1918 trial in which she was sentenced to prison under the Sedition Act. Later deported to Russia and then to Germany, Steimer continued her anarchist activities throughout her life.

Rebecca Solomon’s success as a professional artist was remarkable in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when women artists were the exception rather than the rule. While her artistic style conformed to the most popular art of the time, she used her visual images to critique ethnic, gender, and class prejudice in Victorian England.

Wilma Shore was a writer and teacher most active between the 1940s and the 1960s. She lived at various times in Los Angeles and New York City, settling finally in New York City. Involved with left-wing political activity, she and her husband were blacklisted during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings.

Rosa Schapire was one of the few women to pursue art history studies at a time when the discipline itself was still in its infancy. Her foray into this male-dominated profession was indicative of her allegiance to feminist aspirations to equal opportunity and adult suffrage.

Alice Schalek first entered the public sphere at the turn of the century as the author of a well-received novel, published under the male pseudonym Paul Michaely. The first woman in Austria to become a career photojournalist and travel writer, and the first and only female member of the Austrian Kriegspressedienst (war information unit) during World War I, Schalek paved the way for careers in both photography and journalism for other women.

Miriam Schapiro helped pioneer the feminist art movement, both through her own pushing of creative boundaries and by creating opportunities for other women artists. Starting in 1970, Schapiro raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups.

Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle, a Sephardi woman, risked her life over and over again to aid to her community during World War II. At a later stage in her life, Bouena’s historical-literary acumen enabled her to record Jewish life in Salonika during the twentieth century, including the devastation to her community at the hands of the Nazis.