Michelle Millar Fisher

Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next book, tentatively titled Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit, and, as part of an independent team of collaborators, on a book (MIT Press 2021), exhibition, curriculum, and program series called Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood. The recipient of a master of arts and master of philosophy in art history from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received a master of philosophy from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. 

Millar Fisher has long been interested in the confluence of gender and design, the subject of an independent co-organized exhibition and co-published book, I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment (spring 2018), in conjunction with muca-Roma, Mexico City. She has also 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 a forthcoming journal article on spaces of maternity architecture. 

Previously, Millar Fisher was the Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) where she co-organized Designs for Different Futures (book and exhibition, 2019), helped rethink the display of nineteenth century European decorative arts, and engaged in research for the PMA’s new Gehry Galleries which center contemporary art and design production at local and global levels. From 2014–18 she was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized, among others, the exhibitions Design and Violence, This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good, From the Collection, 1960-1969 and Items: Is Fashion Modern? as well as accompanying catalogs.

This lecture is supported by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lecture Series in SAIC's Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects.