Michelle Donnelly

Michelle Donnelly studies twentieth-century American art, with particular interests in the gendered 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 created prints: the home, the studio, the outdoor environment, the incarceration camp, and the science lab. For the 2023–24 academic year, she is the Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Her research has also been supported by the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art at the Harvard Art Museums, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, UCLA Library Special Collections, and Louisiana State University Libraries.

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 assisted on 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 in 2014 and her BA in Art History with Honors from Vassar College in 2011.