Michelle Donnelly is an art historian and curator, specializing in twentieth-century American art and histories of printmaking. She is currently the 2024–25 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a PhD Candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. Her research interests include the politics of materiality and process, feminist practices of care, placemaking and site specificity, and constructions of race. Her dissertation investigates how American women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional space of the workshop from 1935 to 1975. With critical attention to how acts of making can generate meaning, Michelle participated in the 2022 Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art at the Harvard Art Museums, where she gained a hands-on knowledge of a range of artmaking processes alongside conservators, printers, and artists. In addition, her research has been supported by the Menil Drawing Institute, UCLA Library Special Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

 

In her curatorial practice, Michelle seeks to center women artists and artists of color whose work unsettles traditional disciplinary boundaries and which foregrounds issues of gender, race, and power. She strives to work in community with descendants and is particularly invested in expanding collections of Asian American art; this commitment emerged from her doctoral dissertation, which addresses the impact and legacies of Japanese American incarceration on artistic practices. She was an invited speaker for Asian American Art, Pasts and Futures at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2025) and organized A Study Day in Honor of “Ruth Asawa Through Line” at the Menil Drawing Institute (2024). Prior to joining Yale, Michelle was the inaugural Curatorial Fellow in the Sondra Gilman Study Center at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she curated Experiments in Electrostatics: Photocopy Art from the Whitney's Collection, 1966–1986 (2017–18). Highlighting the innovations of women artists, this exhibition explored how artists who did not have access to traditional printmaking workshops or darkrooms used the copy machine as a hybrid camera/printing press in the predigital age. She has also held curatorial positions at the Yale Center for British Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Morgan Library & Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Heckscher Museum of Art.

 

Michelle’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Grey Room, Woman’s Art Journal, The Public Review, and Pennsylvania History, as well as publications by the Getty Research Institute, Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Yale School of Art. She has presented internationally, including at the College Art Association Annual Conference, Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art World Congress, Feminist Art History Conference at American University, Hammer Museum, the Menil Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Delaware, and Yale University Art Gallery.

 

Michelle earned an MA and MPhil in the History of Art from Yale University, an MA in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Art History with Honors from Vassar College. She will defend her dissertation at Yale University in early fall 2025.