Theater director Tzipi Pines will receive the lifetime achievement award at the 2026 Rosenblum Prize for the Performing Arts ceremony, to be held on Tuesday, November 10, at 6 p.m. at the Enav Cultural Center, 71 Ibn Gabirol Street, Tel Aviv-Yafo. The prizes are awarded by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality and will be presented in the presence of Mayor Ron Huldai.
Prizes for outstanding artists go to Orly Portal, Maureen Nehedar and Yonatan Levy. Prizes for promising artists go to the HaIvriyot ensemble, HaMeshulash Theater, Annabelle Dvir, Orian Lifshitz, Amar Geshen, Or Saadi and Adi Boutrous.
The winners were chosen by a jury chaired by Chen Arieli, with Prof. Orit Wolf, Prof. Shlomit Lev-Aljem, Ronen Itzhaki and Doron Rosenblum.
Lifetime achievement: Tzipi Pines
The lifetime achievement prize carries NIS 28,000. According to the jury, Pines, as a director and artistic director, spent decades promoting original Israeli playwriting and made it a mainstay of the theater repertoire. The jury noted that she gave a stage to many artists, nurtured new voices and repeatedly chose a repertoire that takes on complex social, political and human questions, combining original plays with contemporary interpretations of classics.
Outstanding artists
The prize in this category is NIS 15,000.
- Orly Portal: a dance artist whose work combines the Gnawa tradition, the Feldenkrais method, intuition and precise physical articulation.
- Maureen Nehedar: brings the Persian musical heritage to audiences in Israel and abroad and gives it contemporary expression, moving between ancient liturgical poetry and contemporary artistic statement.
- Yonatan Levy: a director and playwright who has worked in fringe theater for more than 20 years, and also a performance artist, poet, teacher and social entrepreneur. He founded the Sheikh Abreik Festival for Civil Culture and, in recent years, co-founded the HaTahana cultural center in Sha’ar HaAmakim with other artists. His works include “Kroy” (2021), “Aharonchik HaMeragel” (2023) and “Rumpelstiltskin” (2026).
Promising artists
The prize in this category is NIS 10,000.
- HaIvriyot: an ensemble that reinterprets classic Hebrew songs in a contemporary musical language. Its members are Karni Postel, Vered Picker, Galia Hai, Ola Shur Selekter, Raz Shmueli, Roni Wagner, Alex Moshe, Selait Lahav and Shani Shavit. The ensemble was founded, and is produced and artistically directed, by Einat Basser.
- HaMeshulash Theater: Tel Aviv’s LGBTQ theater, founded in 2021, which brings silenced LGBTQ voices in Israel to the stage. Since February 2024 it has been based at the city’s new LGBTQ center in Meir Garden. It has staged about 15 productions and employs about 100 new artists each year. It was founded and is co-directed by Nimrod Danishman, Rom Reznik and Yuval Koren.
- Annabelle Dvir: a dance artist whose work connects ancient Caucasian traditions with contemporary Western worlds.
- Orian Lifshitz: a theater maker, director, playwright, dramaturg and artistic director of Teatron Pombi. Her work takes apart and reassembles images from the ultra-Orthodox world in which she grew up. Her works include “Abba Sheli Hu Tzipor” (2024) and “Hai Shahor BaYa’ar” (2025).
- Amar Geshen: a singer-songwriter who connects the spirit of contemporary indie music with the tradition of personal writing in Hebrew poetry.
- Or Saadi: an artist whose work connects ancient Yemenite dance traditions with contemporary dance.
- Adi Boutrous: a dance artist whose work engages in dialogue with canonical and ancient cultural sources from a contemporary perspective.
The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality has awarded the Rosenblum Prize for the Performing Arts since 1989, funded from the proceeds of a fund named for Gottlieb and Hanna Rosenblum. The couple, Tel Aviv-Yafo residents, bequeathed the Rosenblum Fund for the Performing Arts to the city. The prizes go to artists in theater, acting, dance and music. More details on the ceremony and the winners are on the municipality website (Hebrew).
