Michelle Facos

Michelle Facos (born 1955) is an American art historian, Professor of the History of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Early life

A native of Buffalo, NY, Facos graduated from Kirkland (Hamilton) College in 1976 with a B.A. in art history and comparative literature. Upon graduation, she worked as a paralegal in New York City at Debevoise & Plimpton and White & Case.[1]

Academic career

After working as a paralegal, Facos continued her art historical studies at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, where she studied under H.W. Janson, Robert Rosenblum, Gert Schiff and her advisor, Kirk Varnedoe.[2] Her dissertation, inspired by the exhibition "Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880-1910" (The Brooklyn Museum, 1982–83), was the first doctoral dissertation on Swedish painting written by a North American;[3] it was completed in 1989 and revised and published in 1998 as Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s.[4] In 1996, Dr. Facos was the only art historian and non-Scandinavian invited to join the research project Cultural Processes in Nordic Forest Communities, led by Ingar Kaldal of Trondheim University.[5] She has lectured, taught, and written widely on the subject of Scandinavian art and culture, especially in Sweden. Her most recent books, Symbolist Art in Context and An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art, are read in classrooms around the globe.[6]

Honors and Awards

Facos received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1993, and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1996), the American-Scandinavian Foundation (2007), the Alfried Krupp Foundation (2010),[7] and the Mercator Foundation (2015). She has received grants from the American Philosophical Society (1994) and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (2015). In 2006 she was a guest Professor at Hamburg University, Germany, in 2013 a Visiting Professor at East China Normal University, Shanghai, and in 2014 at Warsaw University, Poland.

Since 2012 she has been Editor-in-Chief of ARTS, an open access scholarly arts journal from MDPI .

Books

Websites