Luni / Ilana Portnoy is a visual artist whose work explores freedom, identity, and the invisible expectations society places upon us. Born in Israel in 1995 to a family of immigrants from Belarus who arrived after the Chernobyl disaster, she grew up between cultures—an experience that shaped her sensitivity to belonging and individuality.

Art became her way to understand the world and express what words could not. She earned a B.Des in Visual Communication from Shenkar College in 2020, where she created Luni: genderless, naked figures living in nature, free from the roles and definitions society imposes.

Luni emerged as a response to these unseen structures—borders, identities, labels, and cultural scripts that divide people from one another and from themselves. By removing gender, clothing, and symbols, Luni returns to something essential: the simple truth of being a body in nature, unclaimed by any nation, religion, or system.

The figures are not tied to a single emotional state. They experience the full spectrum of human feeling—quiet, fear, longing, softness, sadness, lightness, and joy. Their vulnerability challenges the idea that freedom must be euphoric; instead, it suggests that truth lives in the entire emotional range.

Through this openness, Luni invites viewers to question the frameworks they inhabit and to imagine a more liberated, honest way of being—one where identity is fluid, belonging is internal, and humanity comes before separation.