Mirit Cohen

Mirit Cohen (1945, Russia – May 3, 1990, New York City) was a Russian-born Israeli sculptor and painter. Cohen resided in New York City from 1975. In 1990, she committed suicide.

In 1990, Cohen committed suicide by jumping from a building in New York. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery in the borough of Queens.

In the early 1980s she was briefly married to Michael Dissent. Under the influence of LSD Cohen experienced a psychotic attack and was hospitalized in Bat Yam.

In the spring of 1975 Cohen won a scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. With the help of this scholarship she studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975–1977, after which she continued to live in the United States.

In 1972 Cohen had her first exhibition at Dugit Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 1974 the Israeli curator Yona Fisher bought some of her works for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

After her military service, Cohen worked as a clerk in the Israel Export Institute in the textile and fashion department. In 1968 she studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design with Yehezkel Streichman. In 1969 she enrolled at the "Midrasha" drawing and art school in Tel Aviv.

In 1956 Cohen was sent to study at Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk. In 1958 she won a youth drawing competition in Japan. Three years later, Cohen moved back with her parents and began attending high school in Bnei Brak. During this period she became active in the Communist youth movement in Petah Tikva. For her last years in high school she attended Hadash High School in Tel Aviv.

Manya Malka (later Mirit) Cohen) was born in Russia to a socialist and Zionist family. Her father, Haim Cohen, a Polish Jew, was born in Lodz, and fled during the Second World War to Russia, where he met her mother Rebecca – A Russian woman of Jewish descent. After the war, her family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. They were deported to a detention camp in Cyprus. In 1948, after the establishment of Israel, the family settled in Givat Shmuel.