Yael is an artist and writer on a quest to live an authentic, intentional, and creative life and inspire others to do the same.
Yael Gavish (pronounced Ya-EL Ga-VISH) spent many years in the business world before realizing she was living someone else’s life and going back to creating art—a lifelong obsession—instead.
Her work expresses her journey of freeing herself from limitations and societal expectations to live life on her own terms, looking to answer the unanswerable question: Who am I and why am I here?
Welcome
Art
Who are you when you strip away the facade?
In her minimalist, medium- to large-scale paintings and fiber art, Yael documents the lifelong journey to reveal our true selves. She gives form to the state of activated peace we reach when we let ourselves live the life we want, not the life others want for us, replacing external sources of power with a much more potent internal one.
Her quest to discover who she is brought her from a successful technology career in Silicon Valley back to art, a practice she abandoned for 20 years. She realized that societies and institutions fit us into molds, separating us from ourselves, our desires, and our curiosity so completely that we forget who we are and what we want. To remember, we must give ourselves permission to remove the external clutter of adopted behaviors, beliefs, and identities to uncover our intrinsic ones.
Yael’s practice evokes childhood memories of drawing and using rug hooking kits while her mother and grandmother hand-knit beautiful garments. She wishes to recapture the childlike joy in creativity that stems from desire and curiosity, not pressure or expectations. She hooks rugs by hand as a reminder that after paring ourselves down to our essence, the process of rebuilding ourselves from our authentic core is organic, unpredictable, and unique.
Pursuing this path is more challenging than staying in the comfort zone of conformity. But now that the systems that shape us are replacing anything that fits into a mold with AI, we must tap into our individuality to thrive. It is also key to enacting change as a creative process, where we don’t just resist what already exists, but build what we want to see in the world.
Being fully ourselves is the unlock to our greatest contribution to the world.
Writing
Yael shares what she learned about purpose, mindset, and creativity in her quest to live a life that is truly hers.
One day in 2017, she woke up and realized that she built a successful life—for someone who wasn’t her. She quit her senior technology executive job and began several years of experimentation and learning. While the journey eventually led her in a wildly different direction than she expected, her biggest shift was internal: She had to face her own fears and limiting beliefs, as well as the expectations and limiting beliefs of people around her, and radically change the way she thinks and shows up in the world.
As radical steps aren’t feasible for everyone, her writing focuses on ways to improve our well-being and impact right where we are, while also getting to know our true selves, free from social conditioning and ego stories.
Yael hopes that sharing her art and her journey will inspire greater curiosity in others about their purpose and creative potential, and help them live a life they’re in love with.
Biography
Her prior life…
Yael’s experience includes product management at Facebook, Yahoo!, and several startups (including a couple I co-founded), management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and software engineering at Sun Microsystems. She holds a BA and an MSc in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and an MBA from The Wharton School.