The news arrived quietly, then spread quickly, through gallery circles in Berlin, across photography forums, into the homes of friends who had known her as a force of nature wrapped in quiet determination. Yishay Garbasz, an interdisciplinary artist whose work traced the fault lines of memory, identity, and survival, died unexpectedly in March 2026. She was 55 years old and had made Berlin her home since 2005.
Yishay was born in Israel in 1970, and from the beginning, she carried within her a sense of displacement that would come to define much of her work. She grew up between cultures, between languages, between the weight of her mother’s past and her own need to make sense of it. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor, and the shadow of that survival, the way trauma passes through generations, lodging itself in bodies and relationships, became the subject of Yishay’s most sustained artistic inquiry.
In In My Mother’s Footsteps, she retraced the path her mother had been forced to walk during the war, documenting the journey in photographs that were both archival and deeply personal. The work was not about recreating history but about understanding how history lives on in the people who survive it and in the children who come after.
That project established her as an artist willing to go where few would follow, into the uncomfortable intersections of memory, geography, and the body. Her work did not flinch. She photographed border zones, the DMZ between North and South Korea, contested landscapes where ideology hardened into concrete and barbed wire.
She explored xenophobia, belonging, the way nations draw lines and then enforce them. She used photography, performance, and installation to ask questions that had no easy answers, and she did so with a rigor that earned her recognition in exhibitions and publications around the world.
But perhaps her most radical subject was herself. Yishay documented her own gender affirmation journey, becoming Germany’s first trans woman triathlete even as she navigated the lasting effects of an earlier epoxy poisoning that had caused chronic lung issues. She approached her body as both a site of vulnerability and strength, turning her own transition into a public act of authenticity that resonated far beyond the art world.
She swam, biked, ran, and created, refusing to be diminished by the physical limitations that shadowed her. In a culture that often demands trans lives be lived quietly, she lived hers loudly, openly, with a courage that inspired those who witnessed it.
In Berlin, where she had built her life for two decades, she was known as much for her warmth as for her intellect. Fellow artists remember her sharp wit, her generosity with younger creators, the way she could hold space for difficult conversations without making them feel heavy. She mentored without condescension, listened without agenda, and showed up for people in ways that made them feel seen.
The artistic community that now mourns her is international, scattered across continents, but united in grief. Tributes have poured in from galleries where she exhibited, from publications that featured her work, from friends who knew her as Yishay, not the artist, not the advocate, but the woman who laughed easily and loved fiercely. They remember the way she could shift from deep discussion to sudden humor, the way she never stopped asking questions, the way she carried the weight of history without being crushed by it.
Her family has not yet announced specific arrangements, choosing instead to focus on private remembrance in these early days of loss. But the absence she leaves is already being felt in the quiet streets of Berlin, in the studios where she worked, in the hearts of everyone who was touched by her honesty and her light.
Yishay Garbasz was 55 years old. She was an artist, a triathlete, a daughter, a friend. She traced her mother’s footsteps through a continent marked by atrocity and transformed that journey into art. She documented her own transition with the same unflinching honesty she brought to every subject, becoming a visible, vibrant presence in a world that often tries to erase people like her. She swam against currents both literal and figurative, and she never stopped creating, even when her body failed her.