David Kassan was born on February 25, 1977 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He grew up in the Philadelphia area, raised in a family haunted by stories that were never fully told. His grandfather Murray Kassan had escaped ethnic cleansing on the Ukrainian-Romanian border in 1917, fleeing the Cossacks to reach America. But when David’s father was fifteen, Murray was estranged from the family. He died when David was very young. The story of survival became fragments, whispers, a legend without details.

Kassan studied at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, graduating with a BFA in 1999. He continued at the National Academy and the Art Students League in New York, winning awards from the Portrait Society of America, the Art Students League, and the Society of Illustrators. In 2003, the Newington-Cropsey Foundation gave him a travel grant to study and sketch masterworks in Italy.

He painted life-size portraits that combined hyperrealist figures with abstract or trompe-l’œil backgrounds. Transparent layers of oil built up like lattices of veins, blood, and skin. Light entered and reflected back. His subjects were family, friends, strangers on the street. He captured blemishes, odd hairs, the weight of consciousness behind pensive faces. The paintings pulsated with life.

For years, he avoided commissions. They compromised his artistic values. Then in 2014, an Israeli collector asked if he would paint a portrait. Kassan was about to decline when the man added one detail: his subject was a Holocaust survivor.

Kassan said yes immediately. Not as a commission. As a painting he would control. A way of connecting to the grandfather he never knew.

He called it the EDUT Project. “Edut” is Hebrew for “living witnesses.” His mission was to meet as many Holocaust survivors as possible, to document them in filmed interviews and in paintings. While many survivors had told their stories on video or in memoirs, Kassan believed painting offered something different. A face. A connection. A way of making the abstract horror personal.

He painted each survivor without deadlines, working until the painting demanded to leave the studio. Each portrait became what he called “a nonfiction novel about each person.” Not just the horrors they witnessed, but their resilience across entire lifetimes.

In 2013, he founded the Kassan Foundation to give grants directly to underprivileged talent in visual and musical arts. He moved between Brooklyn and Albuquerque, teaching workshops around the world while continuing the EDUT Project. His work entered public collections worldwide, exhibited at institutions including the MEAM European Museum of Modern Art.

His paintings have sold at auction for up to $8,925. But the real value isn’t measured in dollars. It’s measured in the stories preserved, the faces remembered, the connection finally made to a grandfather’s lost history.

His strengths: Exceptional technical mastery creating luminous flesh tones through layered glazing, deep anatomical knowledge applied to convey emotion, ability to capture psychological depth in his subjects, courage to use his talent for historical documentation rather than commercial success.

Career highlights: The ongoing EDUT Project documenting Holocaust survivors, founding the Kassan Foundation, awards from Portrait Society of America and Society of Illustrators, exhibitions at MEAM and major galleries, teaching internationally while maintaining studio practice in Brooklyn and Albuquerque.