Irene Oore was born in Łódź, Poland to Jewish Holocaust survivors and immigrated to Israel with her parents at eight years old. She studied at a French convent in Jaffa and later at San Francisco State, the University of Tel-Aviv, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Western Ontario. In both her M.A. and her Ph.D., a central topic was expression through art, in particular, through writing. Dr. Oore is the Alexander McLeod Chair in Modern Languages and Professor of French Literature at Dalhousie University, and her research explores the interrelationships between various modalities of art. She has painted for most of her life, until 10 years ago in oils, and since then, in watercolours.