Gil Z. Hochberg is theRansford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern studies south Asian studies and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University New York. Professor Hochberg’s research focuses on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. With a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UC Berkeley 2002) her early work was primarily about literature. Her later work shifted to visual arts, primarily cinema, video art, photography and painting. Her main interest centers on questions of representation and power, particularly in the context of colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism, with a concentration on Palestine, Israel, Zionism as well as a broader interest in (post)colonial South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

She has published numerous essays about Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, Palestinian and Israeli cinema, postcolonial cinema, queer studies, photography, colonial oppression and legacies of resistance across gender, race and sexual minorities, Race and Religion. Her most recent book My Father the Messiah: a Memoir (Duke University Press 2026) is a creative nonfiction text about messianism, mental illness, religion, queerness, Judaism, Zionism, anti-Zionism and the relationship between these all. She is also the author of a bilingual (French, English) book about the Benin Artist Roméo Mivekannin, Orientalisme (Editions Cécile Fakhoury, October 2025). In addition, Hochberg is the writer of several gallery catalogues, co-editor of special volumes on photography, and author of numerous option essays and creative nonfiction.