CV
EDUCATION
Expected 2025 | PhD, History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT
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Dissertation: "Outside the Workshop: Alternative Spaces of U.S. Printmaking, 1935–1977"
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Committee: Jennifer Raab (advisor), Jennifer L. Roberts, Kim Conaty, Joanna Fiduccia, Edward Cooke
2021 | MPhil and MA, History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT
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Exam Fields: American Art, Indigenous North American Art, Feminism and Contemporary Art, Art of the British Empire
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Qualifying Paper: "Kiowas Moving Camp: The Unboundedness of Stephen Mopope’s Anadarko Post Office Mural"
2014 | MA, History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
2011 | BA, Art History (Honors), with minor in History, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
SELECTED CURATORIAL EXPERIENCE
Sept. 2023–June 2024 | Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellow
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
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Conducted collection research; consulted on acquisitions
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Organized A Study Day in Honor of "Ruth Asawa Through Line" in consultation with the Asawa Estate
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Participated in Inside Drawings: A Workshop on the Materiality of Unique Works on Paper, a weeklong professional development program for international curators sponsored by the Getty’s Paper Project Initiative
Sept. 2019–May 2020 | Guest Curator, Painting & Printmaking
Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
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Collaborated with 24 MFA candidates to curate their two-part thesis exhibition, ONLY WHEN YOU ARE CALLED: Yale Painting & Printmaking MFA Thesis Show (2020), and write a publication
Participated in weekly crits and conducted studio visits with artists
Sept. 2019–May 2020 | Yale-Smithsonian Graduate Research Assistant
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
& Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
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Contributed to The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture (2024–25) at the Smithsonian
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Conducted archival and object-based research
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Collaboratively developed a workshop to forge interdisciplinary discussions about race, power, and museums
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Coordinated meetings with community organizers, curators, museum educators, professors, and students to think critically about how empire, class, gender, and geography have informed ideas of race
Jan. 2016–July 2018 | Inaugural Curatorial Fellow, Sondra Gilman Study Center
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
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Curated Experiments in Electrostatics: Photocopy Art from the Whitney's Collection, 1966–1986 (2017–18); contributed to Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 (2020), Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (2018), Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables (2018), Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney's Collection, 1900-1960 (2017–19), An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney's Collection, 1940–2017 (2017–18), Willa Nasatir (2017), and Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection (2016–17)
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Developed and implemented protocol in collaboration with Conservation, Exhibitions & Collections Management, and Research Resources for the inauguration of the Sondra Gilman Study Center—a storage, research, and display facility for the majority of the Whitney's collection of over 19,000 works on paper
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Facilitated over 200 appointments for over 500 visitors; provided access to over 1,000 objects
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Conducted exhibition, collection, and acquisition research
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Managed exhibition checklists and database records
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Wrote and edited didactic materials for works from throughout the Museum’s collection
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Proposed, recommended, and processed acquisitions; supported triannual Drawing and Print Committee meetings
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Administered bimonthly Loan Committee meetings; managed loan files
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Collaborated with Education and Advancement on Study Center programming
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Co-curated the inaugural staff art exhibitions at Westbeth Gallery
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Hired, trained, and supervised 3 interns annually
Sept. 2014–Sept. 2015 | Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellow, Photography
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY
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Contributed to Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (2017), Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World (2016), and Hidden Likeness: Emmet Gowin at the Morgan (2015)
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Conducted exhibition, collection, and acquisition research
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Managed exhibition checklists and database records
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Wrote and edited didactic materials for works from throughout the Museum’s collection
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Directed the re-organization and management of the photography collection; catalogued 200 acquisitions
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Supported Photography Collectors Committee meetings; processed new acquisitions
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Led an exhibition evaluation by conducting interviews and demographic surveys with visitors; presented a final report that assessed the impact of the exhibition on audiences to the Kress Foundation and Museum staff
June 2013–Aug. 2014 | Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
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Curated Art for Society’s Sake: The WPA and Its Legacy (2013–14); contributed to World War I and American Art (2016–17), Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (2015–16), and David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014–15)
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Conducted exhibition, collection, and acquisition research
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Managed exhibition checklists and database records
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Wrote and edited didactic materials
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Drafted loan letters; managed loan correspondence
June–Aug. 2012 | Research Assistant
Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY
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Contributed to Modernizing America: Artists of the 1913 Armory Show (2012–13) and Mirrored Images: Realism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2012–13)
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Conducted research
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Wrote and edited didactic materials
Sept. 2011–May 2012 | Curatorial Intern, Panza Collection Initiative
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
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Contributed to On Kawara—Silence (2015)
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Assisted on the Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman case studies for a Mellon-funded project addressing the preservation and future display of Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and Conceptual art in the Museum’s collection
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Conducted archival and object-based research
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Recorded, transcribed, and archived two dozen oral history interviews with Morris, studio assistants, fabricators, conservators, critics, and other affiliates
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Assisted with the planning and coordination of a multi-day Advisory Committee Meeting for international curators, scholars, and conservators
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, & AWARDS
2024–25 | Inaugural Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
2024 | Tyson Scholar of American Art Fellowship (declined)
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
2024 | Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Research Travel Award
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2023–24 | Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
2023–24 | Getty Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship (declined)
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA
2023 | Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship
UCLA Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA
2022 | Arthur J. Quinn Memorial Fellowship
The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, CA
2022 | LSU Libraries Special Collections Research Travel Grant
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
2022 | Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
2022 | The Art & Labour Graduate Summer School
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, UK
2022 | Travel Grant
Association of Historians of American Art
2021–22 | John Marshall Phillips Fellowship in American Art
Yale University, New Haven, CT
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Forthcoming | “Xeroxing from the Hip: A Conversation with Joan Lyons,” in Pioneers of a New Image: Women Artists and Xerography, ed. Zanna Gilbert and Judith Delfiner (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute).
2024 | Book review of Lauren Rosenblum and Christina Weyl, eds., A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries, in Woman’s Art Journal 45, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2024): 66–69.
2024 | “Manual Operations: Joan Lyons’s Haloid Xerox Works and Feminized Labor,” Grey Room, no. 96 (Summer 2024): 74–103, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00407.
2024 | “Solidarity in Print: Review of Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds at the Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin, Texas,” The Public Review, May 9, 2024, https://www.thepublicreview.org/read/michelle-donnelly-solidarity-in-print-elizabeth-olds.
2023 | Book review of Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, and Paul H. D. Kaplan, Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era, in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 90, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 299–304.
2021 | “Bringing the Invisible to Light: Aura and Psychic Photography,” in Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, ed. Robert Cozzolino (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2021). Winner of the College Art Association’s 2022 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.
2021 | “Florine Stettheimer, Four Panel Screen,” in MRC Dossier 7: 2020 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Study Sessions (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021).
2020 | “Introduction: Hybridity/Site/Embodiment,” in Yale School of Art Painting and Printmaking 2020 (New Haven: Yale School of Art, 2020).
2019 | Editor, Ripe at Dawn: Yale 2019 Sculpture MFA Thesis Show (New Haven: Yale School of Art, 2019), with entry on Emilie Gossiaux.
2015–16 | “Art of Dox Thrash” (2016), “Art of Thomas Eakins” (2016), and “Printmaking” (2015), in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/.
SELECTED PUBLIC LECTURES AND GALLERY TALKS
2025 | “Miné Okubo’s Wind and Dust”
Art Bites Gallery Talk
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
2025 | “Grounds of Removal: Matsusaburo ‘George’ Hibi’s Incarceration Camp Prints”
2025 SAAM Fellows Lectures
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
https://www.youtube.com/live/UjYpK43l-80?si=iTqRfZeSE2f-cEs2&t=3332
2024 | “Stamped, Rubbed, Imprinted: Drawing and Impressions of Place”
Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellow Lecture
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPTjMP5J0Hc
2023 | “Barbara T. Smith and Joan Lyons: Xeroxing the Feminine Body”
Women Artists Experiment with Xerox Talk & Tour
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, LA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRuL3x6orfA
2020 | “Black Stone/Black Flesh: Materiality and Race in Francis Harwood’s Bust of a Man”
Art in Context Gallery Talk
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
2019 | “Action and Counteraction: Louise Nevelson in Yale’s Collection”
Graduate Student Gallery Talk
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
2019 | “Xerox Prints from the Yale University Art Gallery’s Collection”
Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Study Room Talk
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
2018 | “Art in the Age of the Xerox Machine”
Insider Focus Lecture
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2017 | “‘I am the Black Woman’: Elizabeth Catlett’s Prints in the Whitney’s Collection”
Insider Focus Lecture
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2016 | “Related, Recreated, Reconstructed: Edward Hopper’s Drawing Practice”
First Friday Art Talk
Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, NY
2016 | “Elizabeth Catlett: The Black Woman Series”
Art at Lunch Lecture
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS
2024 | “Radioactive Surfaces: Caroline Durieux’s ‘Electron Printing’ Matrices”
Matière Matérialité / Matter Materiality: Printing Surfaces Panel
36th Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art World Congress, Lyon, France
2024 | “Before Submersion: Sari Dienes’s Columbia River Petroglyph Prints”
19th Annual Yale American Art Graduate Symposium: Condition
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2024 | “Regroundings: Matsusaburo ‘George’ Hibi’s Prints of the Topaz Incarceration Camp”
The Histories of Camps Panel
College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL
2023 | “The Labors of Care: Ruth Asawa’s Impressions of Domesticity”
The Eighth Feminist Art History Conference
American University, Washington, DC
2023 | “‘The Daily Chores of Living’: Ruth Asawa’s Laundry-Stamp Works”
Art History Works-in-Progress Talk
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
2022 | “Choreographed Encounters: The Intimacy of David Hammons’s Body Prints”
Intimacies: Friction, Restoration, Action – History of Art Graduate Symposium
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
2022 | “Laundry Lists: Ruth Asawa’s Stamp Prints and the Domestic ‘Homeplace’”
The 57th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Symposium: Figuring Space
The Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
2022 | “Mutual Dependency: The Studio Context of David Hammons’s Body Prints”
Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
2021 | “Making Paperwork: Joan Lyons’s Haloid Xerox Portraits and Feminized Labor”
Woman/Artist Conference
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2021 | “Kiowas Moving Camp: The Negotiation of Memory in Stephen Mopope’s Anadarko Post Office Mural”
Mnemonic Aesthetics: Memory and Trauma in Art, 11th Annual Art History Graduate Symposium
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ
2019 | “‘There is a Woman in Every Color’: Color, Skin, and Race in Elizabeth Catlett’s Prints”
“My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples”: A Symposium on Elizabeth Catlett
University of Delaware, Newark, DE
2019 | “‘Instant’ Art: The Haloid Xerox Copier, 1968–1978”
Art and Xerox in a Transnational Context Panel
College Art Association Annual Conference, New York, NY
ACADEMIC TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Spring 2025 | Guest Speaker, SART-154/DMST-116: Experimental Photocopy Art
Instructor: Professor Carolyn Gennari, Art and Art History Department
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Fall 2020–Spring 2021 | Teaching Fellow, HSAR-547: Futures in Art History
Instructor: Professor Jennifer Raab, History of Art Department
Yale University, New Haven, CT
Spring 2020 | Teaching Fellow, HSAR-115A: Introduction to Art History, Renaissance–Present
Instructor: Professor Tim Barringer, History of Art Department
Yale University, New Haven, CT
SELECTED CONFERENCES & PANELS ORGANIZED
2023 | Eighteenth Annual Yale American Art Graduate Symposium: Belonging (co-chair)
Keynote speaker: Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Harvard University
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2022 | The Interstices of Print Panel (co-chair)
Sponsored by the Association of Print Scholars
College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL
2022 | Seventeenth Annual Yale American Art Graduate Symposium: Inheritance (organizing committee)
Keynote speaker: Patricia Marroquin Norby, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2020 | Sixteenth Annual Yale American Art Graduate Symposium: Embodiment (chair)
Keynote speaker: Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
Yale University, New Haven, CT
OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
2024–present | Board of Directors
The Atelier 17 Project, New York, NY
2021–22 | Assistant to the Director of Graduate Futures, History of Art Department
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2021 | Peer Reviewer, Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
Yale University, New Haven, CT
2019 | Interviewer, Oral History Project: The Welders of Lippincott and Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
2017–19 | Exhibition Selection Council
Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY
2016 | Juror, Small Matters of Great Importance: PAPER+ART
Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, NY
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Association of Historians of American Art
Association of Print Scholars
College Art Association
Photography Network
SKILLS AND LANGUAGES
Computer: Adobe Photoshop & Acrobat; Airtable; basic HTML; Google Docs Suite; Microsoft Office Suite; Scrivener; The Museum System (TMS); Zoom; Zotero
Languages: Reading proficiency in Spanish and French
Art Handling: Trained in handling works on paper
Studio Art: Predoctoral workshop training in etching, drypoint, lithography, screenprinting, woodcut, & cyanotype; bronze, plaster mold, & slip casting; undergraduate coursework in drawing & painting