Joyce Dallal is an artist who works in a variety of media, from hand-made books and collage to photography, video, installation, and public art. The themes that resurface again and again in her artwork are those of collective and personal history, community, memory, and the evolution of contemporary cultural identity. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Arts Fellowship in Photography, a City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Grant, and a Brody Arts Fellowship, and she has completed two public art projects for the Los Angeles Public Libraries. She received her Masters in Fine Art from USC and is a professor at El Camino College in Southern California.
    Over the last fifteen years, her work has developed along two distinct tracks. One has been based in personal experience, involving narratives and subjects that grow from her own and her family's history, and the other has followed subject matter related to specific sites and communities in Los Angeles; this latter track has formed the basis for her public projects. The two realms are connected by an interest in examining the ways cultural and ethnic identities mix, evolve, and accommodate to contemporary American culture, and in the attempt to understand, describe, and affect that interaction. Her parents are Jews who immigrated to the United States from Baghdad, Iraq and she was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. The struggle to reconcile her Jewish, Iraqi, and American identities has been a major impetus for her work, and this has only intensified in the last fifteen years since the Middle East has come to dominate the media and affect our lives.