Galia Dor, Ph.D. is an integrative scholar, lecturer and independent artist. She earned her post-graduate degrees in the humanities and the life sciences in Tel Aviv university, in which she has taught courses on Chinese and Japanese philosophy and material culture. As a practitioner of Chinese medicine and martial arts, she also explores body concepts and health, procedural skills and the transformative potential of applied East Asian knowledge; she is involved in public outreach through lectures and seminars in East Asia—with the aim of disseminating Sinological and Japanological knowledge.

Her former field of expertise is the life sciences, with emphasis on evolution and animal behavior (e.g., of the  Bottle-nose dolphin in Eilat or the Japanese Macaques in Japan), and Chinese medicine. Thus, her research is inherently correlate, comparative and interdisciplinary-searching for parallel patterns of “behavior” in (what Western thought considers to be) disparate fields of knowledge.  First and foremost, however, Galia is driven by a relentless curiosity as to the big questions of life, nature and the human mind. 

Dr. Galia Dor is a post-doc fellow at Tel Aviv university and a lecturer at Tel Hai college (Upper Galilee, Israel); she studies the manifestation of emptiness and the space in-between in Chinese and Japanese aesthetics, art and architecture.   It is her desire to spread the knowledge and wisdom of East Asian cultures (i.e., philosophies, aesthetics and art, Buddhism, etc.) in the Western world; it is her contention that within this rich and diverse world of ideas, there is an efficacious seed for change and transformation in some deeply-seated Western patterns of thought.

The need for change and the thirst for new ideas is also interlinked with the environmental, social, technological and cognitive challenges that humanity faces: these challenges demand for a serious re-evaluation of certain dogmatic and inherent patterns of thought, conduct  and beliefs- a revolution of creativity, and innovation. 

Galia travels constantly to East Asia, especially to Japan- a country and culture which has become her true home; she studies Japanese and Chinese art and architecture and the manifestation of traditional principles and ideas in contemporary creations- a passion and academic pursuit which brings her to the most prominent exhibitions, biennales and triennales in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and more.  

*Mondo*…in Japanese, mondō (問答) means the recorded dialogues between a pupil and a roshi  (Zen teacher) as a direct, spontaneous communication and experience rather than reliance on textual sources; it also relates to upaya (skillful means).