B.A. VAN SISE

Invited to Life is a series of portraits and short stories created in four years traveling across the United States to document the inspirational lives of more than 150 Holocaust survivors. Highlighting the diversity of these subjects and their unique lives, the work examines the many ways large and small the world has been remapped by the hopeful roads survivors have made creating a new and better future in their pivot to American life.     

To be released in September 2022 in book form as Invited to Life: After the Holocaust (with contributed essays by Dr. Mayim Bialik, Neil Gaiman, and Sabrina Orah Mark,) and be featured in an expansive solo exhibition at the Smithsonian affiliate Center for Jewish History in New York in 2022.

The project is the bronze medal winner for portraiture at the 2021 Prix de la Photographie Paris.

With thanks to the Holocaust Museum and Tolerance Center, the Museum of Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Witness Project, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Goldie & David Blanksteen Foundation, GLAAD, the Sherwin-Miller Museum of Jewish Art, and the Florida Holocaust Museum for their assistance as we worked with Holocaust survivors across the country.

Previously shown as a public art installation, Eyewitness, in 2018, on New York City Department of Cultural Affairs banners throughout lower Manhattan, and in the New York Times, Times of Israel, Forbes, the Jewish Journal, NY1 News, the Straits Times of Singapore, and Washington Post.