Hanna Ben Dov presented individual exhibitions in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. One of her teachers was the painter Mordechai Ardon.

Hanna was born in 1919 in Jerusalem. She spent her childhood in Jerusalem and in the late 30’s began studying art in Bezalel. One of her teachers, who later became one of her closest friends, was Mordechai Ardon.

When she finished her studies, she spent several years in Israel and then moved to London for few years in which she worked with the Jewish painter Yankel Adler, and at the same time studied in the Camberwell College of Arts. In 1948, Ben Dov moved to Paris, where she was mentored by the abstract sculptor Constantine Brancusi. During this time, her appeal to the abstract was enhances, a style which she perceived as a rebelling in conservatism identified with Modernism.

Ben Dov presented throughout the years dozens of individual and group exhibitions in Paris, all over Europe as well as New York. In Israel, she presented her first exhibition in 1954 in Zemirenski Gallery in Tel Aviv, and in 1970, she presented an individual exhibition in Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Also, he won two awards in Paris, and a large selection of her work is presented in Rockefeller collections in New York, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Museum and the collection of Paris City Hall.

Even though Ben Dov spent most of her life in Paris, she always stayed in touch with artists, galleries and art institutions in Israel. She spent her last years in artists’ elders’ home, until her death in 2009. Ben Dov was married to and an American man but after a short time they divorced. Following the divorce she had an affair with the poet Alexander Pen.