Among Sandra Encaoua’s publication credits, alongside gallery exhibitions and her own books, are collaborations that reveal another dimension of her artistic practice. She has illustrated Prison Insider reports addressing detention conditions around the world, contributed visual work to a French human rights publication on the prevention of torture in prisons, created artwork for an interfaith New Year’s message involving France’s Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant communities, and illustrated the Hasidic mystical text The Baal Shem Tov on Prayer by Rabbi DovBer Pinson.
These collaborations are not separate from her artistic practice. They exist alongside her gallery work, public art commissions for two American cities, and a fourteen-year exhibition record that includes the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, Art Basel Miami, and the Centre Européen du Judaïsme in Paris.
What connects them is one of the central convictions behind Sandra Encaoua’s work: visual art can carry emotional and spiritual weight, and what happens between a painting and the person looking at it matters as much as the painting itself. This approach has led human rights organizations to commission illustrations from her and a Kabbalist rabbi to bring Encaoua’s imagery into dialogue with his writings. It is the same principle that runs through her studio practice.
That studio practice is organized around three principal series of oil paintings and watercolors, each exploring a different territory.
Earth’s Memory (La Mémoire de la Terre) begins with landscape and geological time, considering what persists in the natural world as another form of witness, perhaps even as evidence of a divine presence.
Passing Through (Traversées) turns directly toward the inner life: grief, desire, rupture, and the emotional turbulence that can arise before language is able to grasp or name it.
Judaica engages with Jewish history and what Encaoua describes as the possibility of repairing that history through spirituality.
Her works have been listed on the Artprice and Drouot secondary art market indices since 2012 and are available through Saatchi Art, Artsper, Drouot, and the studio’s online shop, ENCAWEB.com.
Alongside her studio practice, Encaoua is Artistic Director of Éditions des Auteurs Francophones, a Paris-based French-language publishing house for which she designs book covers. These literary editions include works connected with Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Romain Gary.
Her exhibition and awards record also includes public art commissions for the City of Hallandale Beach, Florida, and the City of Kokomo, Indiana.
Her own published books follow the same underlying principle: placing visual art in direct dialogue with literary text.
LoVE?, published in 2022, brings together around 60 original drawings and watercolors exploring romantic love, each paired with a literary quotation selected by the artist.
Oct 7, released in September 2024, gathers a year of drawings and watercolors created in response to the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, each accompanied by a literary passage.
Her third book will be released at the end of September 2026. It draws on the Hebrew phrase Lekh Lekha, an invitation to leave the familiar and move toward the unknown, using it as a framework to explore the personal journey of becoming oneself.
Sandra Encaoua received the medal of the Académie des Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris in 2017 and, in 2020, an artist grant through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ regional regranting program, administered in Miami by Locust Projects, the city’s long-established nonprofit alternative art space.
In 2022, she received first prize in painting from the City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, for her Passing Through series. She is a member of the Fondation Taylor in Paris and the Jewish Art Salon in New York.
Alongside these activities, Encaoua maintains a weekly teaching program comprising six sessions across three venues in the eastern Paris suburbs: the Association 4 Saisons in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, the MCJ in Nogent-sur-Marne, and Centre Hillel in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. The techniques she teaches include oil, acrylic, watercolor, palette knife, and spray paint.
Her approach is to guide each student individually, helping them express their own creativity and imagination while developing a personal artistic language. In many ways, that philosophy echoes the principle underlying Encaoua’s own practice: art is not about imposing a single way of seeing, but about creating the conditions for something personal to emerge.
An exhibition at the Salon des Artistes du Val-de-Marne, held at Villa Médicis, runs through September 27. Her studio will then open to the public for the Visites des Ateliers d’Artistes in Saint-Maur on October 3 and 4.
