Danit Weitzman - Winner of the Liam Otero Prize, Critics Choice Exhibition, Ki Smith Gallery

Danit Weitzman, Anticipation from The Shape of Feeling, 2025 - ongoing. Image courtesy of the artist.

By LIAM OTERO September 9th, 2026

Danit Weitzman's website

I had the distinct pleasure of serving as one of the judges for Ki Smith Gallery’s annual Critics Choice exhibition. With over 300 artist submissions, the selection process was daunting because of the exceptional range in quality present among the artists, such that picking proved a worthy challenge. In addition to the collective votes amongst myself and fellow judges for which artists to include, we were individually tasked with selecting a sole artist to champion. As such, I am excited to announce that the winner of the Liam Otero Prize at Ki Smith Gallery went to Danit Weitzman, a Miami-based video artist whose work is a highly distinctive crossover in art, technology, and psychology.

Danit Weitzman, recipient of the Liam Otero Prize of the Critics Choice Exhibition, poses with one of her pieces from The Shape of Feeling series at Ki Smith Gallery, 2026.

Weitzman graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2025 with a degree in Design & Technology. While a student there, Parsons cultivated a learning culture that encouraged more interdisciplinary approaches to one’s studies. Resultantly, Weitzman acquired a potent combination of skills - artistic and technical - that led to her triple-hyphenate label of Artist, Designer, Coder. For last year’s thesis project, she produced a series called The Shape of Feeling (2025 - ongoing), digital sculptures generative of a person’s emotional state. Think of mood rings, except Weitzman’s animated psychologies are much more effective, interesting, and unique (the last word not being one that I toss around casually).

Danit Weitzman, The Shape of Feeling, 2025 - ongoing. Chart indicating each of the 35 emotional states Weitzman illustrated thus far in this series. Image courtesy of the artist.

As an ongoing project, Weitzman currently has 35 emotional states depicted in these digital works. Each emotion is illustrated as a floating abstract shape that is charged with a virtual kineticism. Some of these emotions pulsate with an anxious intensity, others calmly orbit in circular rotations, while a few appear to dematerialize into particles that remain within a cohesive, yet loosened whole. The Shape of Feeling is heavily informed by affective psychology and embodied cognition, two closely intertwined areas of the cognitive sciences grounded in emotional states and how they are influenced by internal and external agents. 

Danit Weitzman, Admiration from The Shape of Feeling, 2025 - ongoing. Image courtesy of the artist.

Born out of a speech-to-visualization process, Weitzman used a platform that aurally processed spoken statements of one’s emotions and feelings, which were then reinterpreted into visual form. She then proceeded to figure out how best to portray these emotional states in a way that was more abstract, but could still be communicative of these quintessentially human responses. For example, anger is represented as a fiery red, pointy, asteroidal shape giving off an abrasive, stand-offishness. Contrastingly, curiosity is treated with a healthy moderation gleaned from its gently swaying layers of baby blue discs.

Danit Weitzman, Anger from The Shape of Feeling, 2025 - ongoing. Descriptive analysis from the chart of feelings in this series. Image courtesy of the artist. 

As someone who writes extensively on New Media art and is a practicing video artist, Weitzman’s work resonated because it was a technologically-rooted art that really was powered by heart and soul, such that it invited viewers - in turn - to better understand their inner states of being.

There can be this preconceived notion that the theme of Art & Technology is absent of the emotional pull one expects to receive from a painting, photograph, or sculpture. That assertion just isn’t true at all, and you can look to Weitzman’s art as an important example of where New Media can still invoke the most intimate or intense of expressions within us … perhaps, even more significant now with the hyper-awareness and sensitivity to technology’s influence and reach in every aspect of our lives. Weitzman’s The Shape of Feeling is the much needed balm for how non-AI creative technology can be applied to better usage. This is a technology that adds to our humanity, rather than takes away from it. WM