Michele Brody
B
generation New York builder. From her grandfather, an inventor, she learned to find creative
solutions to tricky problems. Her mother, a landscape photographer, gave her her first camera for
documenting her installations. Growing up in this self-motivated family of creatives, she was
inspired to build forts from natural materials in the woods of 1970s Staten Island, suggesting a
future shaped by nature's tenacity within the built environment.
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Brody first enrolled at Penn State University as an Architecture major and later earned a BA in
Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989. In 1994, she completed an MFA in Fibers
and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, marking the beginning of a 30-
year career as an independent installation artist. The award of grants and artist residencies from
such institutions as the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts,
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pollock/Krasner Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts,
Skowhegan, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center enabled
her to maintain a full-time creative practice as a mixed-media environmental artist outside
traditional gallery markets.
Michele Brody has been commissioned to create site-specific installations internationally at the
Atelier-galerie d’Art Contemporain: Arras, France; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo:
San José, Costa Rica; Dina4 Projekte: Munich, Germany; and the Cheng Long Wetlands
International Environmental Art Project: Cheng Long, Taiwan. Solo Exhibitions across the US
include the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Central Michigan University
Art Gallery, Mount Pleasant, MI; Temple Judea Museum, Elkins Park, PA; Urban Institute for
Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Yavapai College Art Gallery, Prescott, AZ; and the
McCarthy Art Gallery, Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, VT. Collaborations with NYC
exhibition venues showcasing her work include the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Hudson
Guild, Bronx Museum, Chashama, both the Brooklyn and NY Botanical Gardens, and the artist-
run spaces of JVS Project Space and AAA3A.
Notable accomplishments include the self-directed public art project Recovering The Cityscape:
Impressions of History Underfoot, which successfully installed a uniquely designed, functional
manhole cover in 2002 commemorating the Assay Office building for the Branch Bank of NY,
which stood at 30 Wall Street from 1823-1915. In 2006, she produced two permanent public
artworks in The Bronx: one for the MTA at Allerton Station and one for the Department of
Education's Public Art for Public Schools program. In 2011, she won Best 3-D Entry at the
International Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and second place in the 2024
Fiber Art Now Winter Excellence in Fibers IX exhibition. In 2024, Brody was also awarded the
Nature Conservancy’s 2024 Andy Warhol Visual Arts residency in Montauk, Long Island. Most
recently, during the summer of 2025, Brody mounted her one-person show, "Arboreal Ethereal,"
at the Bronx River Art Center, spotlighting the culmination of a two-year residency in their Artist
Studio Program. She currently maintains a studio with YOHO Artists Studios in Yonkers'
historic Alexander Smith Carpet Mills District.