Sitar Balaban (b. 1994, Israel) is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with glass while incorporating textiles, metal, concrete, and print-based processes. Her sculptural practice explores how personal narratives, memory, and lived experiences become embedded in material, examining how rupture reshapes the body and identity. Currently an MFA candidate in Glass at the University of Texas at Arlington, Balaban received her B.F.A. with honors in Ceramic and Glass Design from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.
Balaban approaches sculpture as a way of translating personal narratives into material form. Memories, family histories, and experiences of transformation become points of departure, unfolding through the physical language of glass and mixed media rather than through linear storytelling. Through acts of blowing, breaking, stitching, casting, and assembling, she creates sculptures where absence, repair, and material traces become evidence of adaptation and resilience. For Balaban, glass is not simply a medium but a body, one that can fracture, bear scars, and continue to exist in a transformed state without erasing its history. Her sculptures move between vessel and body, artifact and living form, embracing incompleteness as an essential part of transformation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Israeli Art Biennale at the Eretz Israel Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Arlington Museum of Art, the BIG Festival in Biot, France, and EN Gallery in Seattle. Her work has been featured in New Glass Review 45, and she has received scholarships and awards from the Polonsky Foundation, AIDA, Penland School of Craft, and the University of Texas at Arlington.