Susana Lezra: About Me
Nice to meet you
Let me tell you about myself. Language, art, travel, and curiosity are constants in my life.
I was born into a multi-cultural, multi-lingual environment. I learned English and Spanish simultaneously so I have what is called a bilingual brain! At the age of ten, I began to move around the globe first with my parents and siblings and later continued moving from country to country on my own and still later with my child, Billy. I learned a few languages along the way (as did Billy) and so I know from personal experience the joys and challenges of learning a new language.
I work with seven languages and teach three. I translate texts of all sorts and especially enjoy simultaneous interpretation. I find the mental rigor of simultaneous interpretation to be especially exciting.
My first encounter with clay was astonishing. My father, together with a group of potters, ran a ceramic factory that was cooperative. On a very special weekend, my father took me to the factory. As I waited for him, I wandered around the kiln room and into the pottery room where I sat down on a bench directly in front of one of the potters.
He was working on a kick wheel and had a huge hump of clay on the wheel. I sat and watched him turn that lump of clay into goblet after goblet. I must have looked astonished as I sat there transfixed, utterly mesmerized and transported into the clay. At one point he looked at me with amusement and a twinkle in his eye: he saw in me the wonder that I felt. I watched his movements and gestures one after the other-all the same, over and over again, rhythmical, precise and graceful in constant flow.
I remember thinking that it was magic. I thought that I had witnessed magic before my very eyes. I have never forgotten that image nor the awe I felt at that moment. It was that very feeling and image that led me to sit at my first potters´ wheel when I lived in the Middle East.
I began to take photographs very early in my travels. As a young fifteen-year-old living alone with my grandmother in a secluded area, I soon found that my camera connected me to my surroundings and so it became a way for me to relate to the world. I began taking photos of swans on the lake close to her house and have continued taking photos to this very day. Today I work in mixed media, jewelry design and ceramics. Please take a look at my work in the Art section of the website.
