Ofrat was born in
Tel Aviv in 1945 by the name Gideon Fridlander. He received his
bachelor's degree in 1968 from
Tel Aviv University, and his master's degree in 1970 from
Tel Aviv University (including a year at
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island). In 1974 he completed a doctorate at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The subject of the
doctoral dissertation was "The Definition of Art (in Hebrew: הגדרת האמנות" and it was later published as a book by the same name, by HaKibbutz Hameuchad. Between 1970 and 1981 he taught modern drama in the Department of Theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from 1972 to 1995 he was a senior lecturer of philosophy at the
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. He has also been a guest lecturer on Israeli art at various institutions in Israel, the US and Canada. In 1976 and 1979, he curated the first performance festivals in Israel: "Exhibit 76" and "Exhibit 79", at the Artists' House in Tel Aviv, and even coined the Hebrew term for performance art (Meitzag) and for installation art (Meitzav). From 1993 to 1995, Ofrat curated the Israeli pavilion at the
Venice Biennale, where he presented, among other things, Avital Geva's unique greenhouse project. In 1993–1994 he was an art lecturer at the
University of Haifa, and from 1998 to 2000 he was a lecturer of philosophy and art at the Alma House of Hebrew Culture College and at the Open University of Tel Aviv. From 2001 to 2000 he was a lecturer in the fields of philosophy and cinema at the
Jerusalem Cinematheque and a visiting professor at the
Yeshiva University in New York. From 2002 to 2005, he served as artistic director and chief curator of "Time for Art", an exhibition space in Tel Aviv. He was the curator (together with Galia Bar-Or) of the exhibition "Hegemony and Multiplicity – The 1950s in Israeli Art" at Ein Harod museum. The emphasis in his artistic activities is on local art. As a curator and historian, he works in full collaboration with the art field – with the artists themselves, with family archives and with museums in the periphery of Israel. Ofrat was married to photographer Aliza Auerbach until her death in 2015. He currently lives in Jerusalem. == Publications ==