Lives and works in Dallas, Texas, USA

Michele Mikesell (she/her) is a Filipino American artist living and working between the United States and Spain. She studied painting and graphic design at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX for her BFA and completed her MFA at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in 2004. Her work can be found nationally and internationally in many private and corporate collections, and has been exhibited extensively at numerous art fairs around the world, including Art Miami, Scope, Context, and the London Art Fair, as well as in solo exhibitions from Los Angeles and Atlanta to London and Bangkok.

“Creating individuals through the material possibilities of paint is what I find most interesting in the studio,” Mikesell says. Her work explores the universal human experience, focusing on human features with anthropomorphic figures. Her paintings hone in on the connection between human ideas and animal instinct. Irony, contradiction, humor, and tragedy are persistent themes throughout her work—rife with both playfulness and melancholy, intimacy and isolation. Along with the strength of her subject matter, Mikesell’s paintings are noted for their refined presentation. By wiping, scraping, and sanding layers of paint, she builds a surface rich in contrast yet visually unified.

Influenced by a diverse range of art movements—including Abstract and German Expressionism, Art Informel, children’s art, and the 17th-century Dutch Primitives—she works without a preconceived endpoint. Her process is intuitive, a continual acting and reacting to the marks made within the paint.

Mikesell is a self-proclaimed cowgirl. When she is not in the studio, you can find her hiking, camping, and kayaking throughout the West with her husband, photographer Barry Snidow. For the past five years, they have been renovating a house in a small village outside of Valencia, Spain.