Dora Holzhandler's naïve art has many fans, Irish writer Edna O'Brien and television art historian Sister Wendy Beckett amongst others - she has even painted a portrait of Charlie Chaplin. She illuminates human life with compassion, loving humour, and awe. Her faces are childlike in execution but are surrounded by motifs reminiscent of Polish art, Persian miniatures and Byzantine mosaics, which give them a medieval, mystical feel. Her figures are often set into landscapes of verdant Eden-like gardens.

Born in Paris in 1928 into a family of Polish refugees who later sent Dora to live with a Catholic foster family on a farm in Normandy France. She returned to her large Jewish family and in urban life when she was five years old. In 1934 the family moved to the London, where, in 1948, she attended the Anglo-French Art School in St. John's Wood where her innate yet non-insular naïveté was recognized and she was allowed to paint in her own style.

Dora has described herself as a mystic, 'proud of her Jewish origins'. This Jewish life is an important aspect of her Art. Together with her studies in Jewish and other mystical traditions, she has had many Tibetan teachers including the great Tibetan Lama, the late Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche Sogyal Laker Rimpoche, auther of the best selling 'Tibetan Book of Living and Dying' and she has had an audience and is a follower of His Holiness The Dalai Lama of Tibet.