Michelle Donnelly

Michelle Donnelly studies twentieth-century American art. Her research interests include the gender politics of materiality, intermediality, and process; placemaking and the embedded histories of site; and visual and material (de)constructions of race. Her dissertation, “Spatialized Impressions: American Printmaking Outside the Workshop, 1935–1975,” explores five alternative sites in which women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking: the home, the studio, the outdoor environment, the incarceration camp, and the science lab. She is the 2024–25 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she was the 2023–24 Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Her writing is forthcoming in Grey Room and Woman’s Art Journal and has appeared in publications by the Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Yale School of Art, among other institutions.

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) and contributed to such exhibitions as Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 (2020), Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (2018), and Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables (2018). She has also held curatorial positions at the Yale Center for British Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Morgan Library & Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Heckscher Museum of Art. Michelle earned her MA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Art History with Honors from Vassar College.