About our Curators
Meet our curatorial partners who selected artists to join the Online Artists Directory by special invitation for their outstanding work.
Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe NM
Brian Fleetwood
Brian Fleetwood, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, is a jeweler, educator, and curator currently based in Northern New Mexico. Informed by traditional stories and making practices, a youth spent in rural Oklahoma, a background in biology and ecology, and lived experience with autism, Fleetwood's work examines jewelry's ability to mediate between a body and the space it occupies. He utilizes collaboration and experimentation with material and process to create work that aspires to behave like living things. This work investigates the connections between different ways of knowing, acts of making, and the unexpected and complex kinship between ourselves and everything else. He holds an MFA in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently an assistant professor of Studio Art at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA
Michelle Millar Fisher
Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts within the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her dissertation is titled, Craft Schools: Forming American Craft Culture Through Sites of Collective Pedagogy, 1970-1985.
At the MFA, she is working on her next book and exhibition, tentatively titled Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit, which is taking her across 48 contiguous US states via train over the course of a year. She is also the co-founder of the Designing Motherhood project and has long been interested in the confluence of gender and design. She has written widely on care work, mothering, and reproductive labor, including parenting in museums and hiding care work at work, being childfree, grief and mothers, and the architecture of maternity. Previously, she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. She is part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Creative Business Accelerator, Pittsburgh PA
Katie Johnson
Katie Johnson is an artist, arts administrator and business coach based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is passionate about supporting creative entrepreneurs and helping artists build successful and resilient careers through programs, coaching, and other opportunities. Formerly the Director of Braddock Tiles, a project that taught youth job readiness skills through the art of ceramic tile making, she now works as the Director of Bridgeway Capital’s Creative Business Accelerator, which offers both education and capital for artists.
