Eliana Pliskin Jacobs is a Yiddish singer, circus performer, visual and performance artist, and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her solo inter-disciplinary work combines circus, music, visual and performance art and examines themes of ghostliness, history of place, migratory identity and ethereal liminality. She holds a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, as well as an MFA from HEAD-Geneva and the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin under the supervision of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
Eliana began training and performing circus at the age of 12 in the United States, and since 2012 has been performing, teaching, choreographing and directing productions as an independent aerialist in Western Canada and throughout Europe. Trained in Baroque and Yiddish singing, Eliana has performed with various klezmer bands and as a soloist with the Dresden Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestras. In 2023 she founded the klezmer-circus ensemble Tsirk Dobranotch with the internationally renowned klezmer band Dobranotch; the ensemble has created three productions, which they continue to tour internationally. Since 2018, Eliana has been exhibiting and performing visual work in solo and group exhibitions and artistic interventions around Europe. These include, among others, exhibitions following residencies at Haihatus (Joutsa, 2018), Kemijärvi (2018) and Pilotenkueche (Leipzig, 2019), the research and online exhibition project “HABITER” (2021), ongoing public interventions with the Kunstkollektiv Marinus (of which she was a founding member in 2022), a solo performance and exhibition for the Amo Collective’s “Decolonial Flânerie” at the Humboldt University Berlin (2023), and solo performances at her family’s former places of residence: “Brenzilber” (Berlin, 2021) and “Das atmende Haus” (Dresden, 2025). Eliana is currently a guest researcher with the Research CoLab “Modes of Intersectional Conversation” at the Humboldt University Berlin’s Institute for European Ethnology.
www.eliana-arts.com