Jerusalem, Israel’s contested capital, is a city in conflict. Its crowded neighborhoods jut up against fault lines both political and personal. Its tribes — Jewish and Muslim, secular, extremist and all the colors in between — rub shoulders uncomfortably on the city’s buses and trains, but mostly stick to the corners of the city they have claimed for their own.

But Karen Brunwasser wants you to look closer. The Jerusalem she knows and loves, she says, is a place filled with diverse, boundary-defying people. As the deputy director of the Jerusalem Season of Culture, Brunwasser spearheads an annual summer festival of music, dance and performance art that has been calling citizens out of the woodwork since 2010. This year, after a monthlong calendar that included artistic installations across city rooftops; an all-night dance party that combined Jewish soul music with Arabic liturgy; and a live art performance that doubled as a sociology experiment, she is confident that others are beginning to recognize the change in Jerusalem as well.

“Jerusalem is a place where people have all sorts of preconceived notions about what it is and what its problems are, but when you come and encounter the place you realize the city is filled with human beings who can’t be boxed in, and they challenge your preconceptions,” she told Al-Monitor. “The festival is all about taking that and putting it on stage.”

Brunwasser, a native of Philadelphia, Penn., has lived in Jerusalem for 12 years. In 2010, while working with the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, one of the world’s largest and most influential Jewish charities, she helped dream up the Jerusalem Season of Culture as an organization that would electrify the age-old city with modern creative energy.