Bracha L. Ettinger is an artist-painter and artist-theorist, philosopher, and supervising psychoanalyst whose work, emerging from the 1990s onward, has reshaped contemporary European painting alongside philosophy, psychoanalysis, art theory and history, film and literary studies, critical theory, and feminism.

She is the originator of matrixial theory, which proposes a metaphysical paradigm for rethinking subjectivity, transjectivity, and femininity — an approach she describes as metafeminism. Against the phallic structure of mainstream Lacanian thought, matrixial theory opens a dimension of emergence: a shareable psychic borderspace underlying individual experience, where several becoming-subjectivities co-affect one another before differentiation. Her conceptual vocabulary — the matrixial gaze, borderlinking, metramorphosis, co-poiesis, wit(h)nessing, fascinance, carriance, co-emergence — has become a working language across the humanities, and runs from aesthetics through to ethics and the reframing of social relations.

Her painting is a research into depth and colour-as-light and into the archival traces of trauma, engaging historical and personal memory in relation to women, war, oblivion, and witnessing. In her notebooks she articulates a relation between beauty and compassion-beyond-empathy, working past the division between empathy and abstraction.

Ettinger’s thought developed in close dialogue with the leading figures of late twentieth-century French philosophy, and her extended conversations with Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-François Lyotard have been published and are widely cited. She holds the Marcel Duchamp Chair at the European Graduate School and is the author of The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press). She lives and works in Paris and Tel Aviv, and has taught at GCAS nearly every year since 2023.