M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates socially-engaged events, public-exchanges, and artworks to help reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people and the land they live on. Her works start by slowing down, asking questions, gathering stories and inviting people to collaborate.
Michelle’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Italy, Germany, Poland, and Serbia and has received awards and national recognition by the Americans for the Arts and Public Art Network. For the Aliquippa Projects, she received the Key to the city of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania and May 15 was named Michelle Illuminato Day.
Recent work includes: A Garden is an Event: Stone Dinner, a collaboration with Rory Sparks, Portland, Perfect Action, a creative mall-walk at Llyod Center Mall, Portland (with Kye Grant), Momentary Monuments for a Wednesday Afternoon, Portland, Tripoli Street BakeYard, Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center, Pittsburgh, and Lost & Found Factory, Pittsburgh and Denton, Texas. With next question, she created, The Neighborhood Revisited, a trolley tour that used Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood to better understand shifting city spaces.
Currently Michelle is an artist in residence at the Little Bird Lab, Oregon State University and is working in the field with biologists and artists to ask new questions together about this changing world. Michelle is a Professor at Portland State University where she heads the CORE Program and teaches in the Art + Social Practice Graduate Program. She lives in Portland, Oregon.