Hashmi'ini
Narrative Interviews
In a world of stories, we curate testimonies - dwelling inside another woman's biography, collecting aspirations, and granting them unique validation.
Faces
In an era of automation, bureaucracy, and smart systems, everywhere you look you find faces longing to step away from the screen and turn their gaze back to the person, back to the human encounter. Face to face. Before all else.
Before All Else - I'm Dana
First and foremost - I'm Dana. True to my name - rooted in the Hebrew for deliberating and exploring - I love diving into the essence of things, examining them from different angles, and always asking questions to open up new possibilities. Children I've accompanied used to call me 'the Lawyer Lady,' but truth be told, more than framing laws and debates, I seek to meet - and truly connect with - people.
Over the years, I've moved across therapeutic law, education, group processes, and community-engaged creation. This site is a kind of permanent exhibition, a portfolio, or perhaps a travel journal, inviting you to discover different facets of of action and learning between law and encounter.
The Face of Action
Who Dares to Turn Their Gaze and Clear Space?
The Peles Center
At the heart of Jerusalem's complexity, between the street and the law, a trailblazing endeavor emerged - one that carved new paths. Not a single path, but many. Paths that could only be paved by diverse individuals who realized that their strength lay in their diversity. This is the story of the Peles Center, and of the courage to make room and turn one's gaze.
Read moreThe Human Face
Does anybody hear me?
Meeting Journal
Over the years, the pathways of my heart have become a travel journal and a burden journal of children, youth, families, and individuals whom I accompanied along a certain chapter of their path. Each and every one of them taught me a different lesson about life in its fullness. Above all, I learned about the labyrinths of the soul, the meaning of connection, and the heroism of the human spirit. Due to the duty of confidentiality, their stories are presented here with altered facts and changed identifying details, written reflectively about the encounters with them. Each story is personal and unique, yet within it echo the voices of dozens and hundreds of additional stories that space is too short to tell.
Read all the storiesThe Face of Us
How to Nurture a Human Corner?
Community as a Resource
Out of this work, a question arose: How well do we truly know those who share a wall, a street, roots, an office, or land with us? In an effort to deepen acquaintance with those who are close yet not necessarily familiar, I found myself in living "research labs" where the human encounter is the active element navigating between distance and closeness.
Time and again, I discovered how deeply relationships serve as a supportive resource, especially in conditions of scarcity - and how slowing down and dwelling in screen-free human time strengthens our sense of meaning, particularly in the age of the machine. I discovered togetherness, in all its colors and shapes, as a perpetual searching, finding, losing, and rediscovering of our own face - in the face of the Other.
Amira | אֲמִירָה | أميرة
Drama-Based Learning
Language, story, and text meeting body, voice, and movement among people and in spaces rarely given a stage.
Henna | הֵנָּה | هِنِّ
Cross-Cultural Women's Encounters
Dwelling in the space between difference and similarity, discovering that the different is more similar, and the similar more unique, than we imagined.
Beautiful • Warless • Wild
Refugee Women's Sharing Circles
In the absence of a permanent home, an encounter becomes a temporary sanctuary. Shared stories of womanhood, strength, and dreams laying foundations of belonging beyond mortar and brick.
The Face of Connection
What If We Bridge Worlds?
A Person, An Entire Universe
Over the years, I have operated in the fascinating space between person, community, organization, and law - whether developing initiatives for rights realization, formulating and implementing codes of ethics and safeguarding, or providing professional guidance for coping with overload, burnout, and crisis environments.
Today, in a technological, artificial, and systemic world, it is impossible not to notice that the capacity to cultivate human presence is becoming a rare asset and a value of paramount importance. Driven by the desire to preserve this foundational capacity, a growing curiosity impels me to delve deeper into ways of making the human element truly present.
In the living labs of my personal and professional life, I explore processes of learning, change, and dialogue; the interweaving of story, language, body, and movement; self-help groups, support networks, and everything that enables people to meet - and truly connect with - one another.
My work always rests upon a single guiding principle: Human beings. Human faces. Face to face. Person to person. Before all else.