Azriel Cohen, M.F.A., is a visual artist and transcultural facilitator. He paints on location around world, as a way to experience, explore and express the diversity of our planet. He specializes in designing non-threatening contexts that increase understanding between people from differing backgrounds.

He began his formal art studies in Jerusalem, and created sacred Jewish art, combining artistic calligraphy with representational art. His Masters of Fine Arts Degree thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City focused on cross-cultural communication and the relationship between music, dance, visual arts and the written word. Azriel holds several diplomas in mediation theory, including from the Harvard Program on Negotiation.

He has initiated numerous projects that bridge between Jews of different demonimations, people from different faiths and Israelis and Palestinians. In 1997, he founded the Ohr Olam Project, a non-denominational Jewish educational program and interfaith program for spiritual seekers in Dharamsala, India, home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. He is co-founder of Peace Begins With Myself (see book Peace Begins Here, by Thich Nhat Hanh), a program that brings Palestinians and Israelis to Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village in France.

The journey of creating the installation about cafes in the Jewish and Arabic sectors of Jerusalem facilitated uncommon encounters with aspects of everyday life in Eastern (Arabic) Jerusalem, and led to a commission to create a series of twenty landscape paintings of Christian Jerusalem for the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem. His current projects include exploring life in Central American rainforests and discovering Sephardic culture in the Iberian Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and Morroco.

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