(exhibition essay)
Nagas Gallery
2025
‘A face is a signature. A measurement of singularity, humanity. No matter where any of us come from, our face is our own: a genetic imprint and sieve of our experiences.
Portraiture as an art form, traps the face in time. Gathers an ephemeral self—a glance, its body at rest or in motion and offers it permanence. Beyond a likeness, it’s an echo. The articulation of the wish to remember a presence and the failure to truly know. An artifact of absence, a portrait is evidence of the impossibility of satisfying its own desire.
What might it mean to make a portrait that reflects the point of view of someone in thrall with the force of another? To render their gaze, their way of seeing, through a stroke of a few lines, suggestions. To be faithful to feeling over accuracy, to throw away the template, the history of the art form that prioritizes representation over abstraction—to try to be true.’
Read the rest of my exhibition essay for Nagas Gallery here.
Read my essay about Leonor Fini for the journal A Women’s Thing here.
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(critic & researcher)
(press about my ongoing project)
Tique: a publication on contemporary art
2025
‘There’s something inexplicable about how much I want to explain it to someone, how wrenching it feels when I look at one of her gouaches—as if my entire chest splits open from the slice of a well-sharpened knife. I’m happy to destroy the meat of my own insides. Pretty evaporates as a relevant description of anything. I become my own experiment, barely cognizant of the borders of my skin. I am not a tame person. If I ever seem that way, when I look at Leben? oder Theater? I lose any resemblance to it.
It’s difficult for me to articulate the origins of my particular desire—it feels as if it still lives in me, born from the underground of myself. A sense of recognition? That’s the closest I can get to describing it.’
Read more about my research project on Charlotte Salomon here.
Read more about the origins of my research project here.
Read my essay about my time researching Charlotte Salomon in Amsterdam and my subsequent conversation with archivist Alexia Marmara here.
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(editor, copy editor, proofreader)
(recent copy editing project of academic book)
ed. by Thomas F. DeFrantz
copy edited in 2024, book forthcoming in 2026
- Brings together a diverse group of authors and scholars, intertwining researchers and artists.
- Features a broad reach of subject matter of dance in the Americas, in Europe, and on the African Continent
- Includes broad coverage of a diverse range of materials, genres, and artists from the emerging field of Black Dance Studies
Read more about the forthcoming book published by Oxford University Press here.
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(editor, research associate, assistant)
For a number of years, I worked as the assistant and research associate of Richard Schechner on his archive of performances, academic texts, plays, performances, and archival objects. When working for him, one of my main projects was to investigate the complex history of the Ramlila of Ramnagar and render his writings, performances, and experiences attending it for 40 years into a coherent whole. This project is still ongoing.
Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies, is a theater director, author, editor of TDR, and the Enactments book series, and University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Schechner has spent years in India, researching traditional and modern performances. He directed Cherry ka Bagicha (Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard) with the National School of Drama Professional Repertory Company, New Delhi. He is the author of many books, translated into dozens of languages. His theatre productions include The
Performance Group's Dionysus in 69, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (which toured India), Seneca's Oedipus, The Oresteia, and East Coast Artist's Imagining O. Schechner has won numerous awards and holds honorary doctorates from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Wroclaw University, Poland, and the University of Rome.
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- A novel on the Argentinian dictatorship, intended as an audiobook for Audible
- An essay on queer dance traditions in Jamaica
- A memoir by a lawyer about his life’s work
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micaelabrinsley@gmail.com
@mic_brinsley
Her debut chapbook, Forward, was recently published by Cutt Press. Her prose can be found in Tenement Press, Asymptote, Tique, Minor Literature[s], and other publications. She is also a contributing essayist for the journal A Women’s Thing, where she writes essays about surrealist and abstract artists. She is also the co-editor-in-chief of the arts and literary magazine, La Piccioletta Barca.
Her work as an independent researcher and freelance editor has taken her across the world from Japan to the United States, the Netherlands, and now to Argentina. Some of her research work includes a testimonial project of ekphrastic writing about the painter Charlotte Salomon, a novel about the Argentinian dictatorship in the 80’s, the editing of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Black Dance Studies through her continued work for the research group SLIPPAGE located at Northwestern University, the development of a memoir about a Chicago-based anti-trust lawyer, and many, many other projects from around the world.
CONTACT ME HERE
- Developmental editing
- Archival research
- Copy editing essays, academic texts, novels, and poetry manuscripts
- Commissions on prose about theater, visual art, surrealist artists, ancient history, feminism, and art criticism
- Proofreading of novels, poetry books, academic texts, film subtitles, scripts, plays, memoirs, and other written work about art, memory, politics, and performance
- Mentorship of young artists seeking to develop their creative voice
I typically charge $30/hr or a flat rate, depending on the scope of the project and financial needs of my clients. I’m flexible! Let me know what feels possible for you.
Tisch School of the Arts
B.A. in Performance Studies
summa cum laude
(2020)
Thesis: In Search of Home, reviews of performances in exile
Cutt Press
2025
‘Beyond the Radius’ (essay)
Deleuzine
2025
(upcoming)
‘What to do when so much is lost’ (prose)
Bleet! zine
2025
‘In Suspension of the Before To After’
Amurmur
2025
‘H. D. After High Definition’ (extract of a work-in-progress)
Tenement Press
2025
‘Octopus’ (poetry)
Cutt Press
2025
‘A Mugshot in Parabola’ (prose)
Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine
2025
‘The Many Faces of Leonor Fini’ (exhibition essay)
Nagas Gallery
2025
‘As the minutes tick to a distance‘ (prose)
époque press
2025
‘Forth and Back’ (poetry)
Discount Guillotine
2025
‘Morisot Making Me Sincere’ (essay)
Minor Literature[s]
2024
‘Nothing to Be Owed’ (prose)
Asymptote
2024
‘Notes for / After / on a Tech Week / in which a play is broken apart‘ (prose)
Tenement Press
2024
‘Before the Slice’ (prose)
Strings Magazine
2024
‘First Page’ (poetry)
Antiphony Magazine
2024
2025
‘Helen Frankenthaler: On Art and the Politics of Emancipation’
2025
‘Méret Oppenheim: Fame and the Myth of Aging’
2025
‘Maruja Mallo and Her Fight Against the World Order’
2025
‘Remembering Hilma af Klint: Her Art, Legacy, and Desire for Privacy’
2024
‘Artist Leonor Fini challenged our notions of the boundary between art and life’
2024
‘More than Just Casual: The Art of Barbara Longhi’
2024
‘Alice Neel’s Portraits and the Force of Her Character’
2024
‘Leonora Carrington: The Moments Before a Legacy’
2023
‘Celia Paul: Reflections through her art and life’
2023
‘Exploring art as friendship: a possible approach’
2023
by Welmer Keesmaat
2025
‘Micaela Brinsley, writer,’ That Poetry Thing
by Yessica Klein
2023
‘One question project: Micaela Brinsley,’ Circle K
by Evelina Kvartunaite
2023
Director, playwright, scholar, and University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review
(rs4@nyu.edu)
Irene Huhulea
Editorial Director of
A Women’s Thing
(irene@awomensthing.org)
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Dancer, choreographer, author, professor, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; a group exploring emerging technology in live performance applications
(thomas.defrantz@northwestern.edu)
Last Updated 24.10.31
Cutt Press
2025
To move forward with desire, to be aware of the multidimensionality of a step. To be conscious of that component of a walk, of its action as consisting of a before, during, and after—but not necessarily in that order. What might it mean for something like lesbian adoration, something always relegated to the sidelines of society’s gaze — “the alleyways, the archives, the diaries, the glances across the street, and, as it is sometimes documented, the bathroom”— for its enactment to be embraced in its totality, rather than be consumed from the outset over fear of its potential disappearance? With the voice of Violette Leduc at the helm alongside those of Virginie Despentes, Deborah Levy, Simone de Beauvoir & Erin Honeycutt themself, FORWARD renders the step as a kaleidoscope, an emblem of lesbian desire, and a place where past, present, and future intertwine.
‘Capturing the slimmer frequencies of a very nuanced thing’ - Erin Honeycutt
Risoprinted by Cutt Press
Text by Violette Leduc &
Simone de Beauvoir,
translated by Derek Coltman
Text by Virginie Despentes
translated by Frank Wynne
Cover photograph by Vareila Mairanga
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Trapped in an underground cave, a DJ named Helen performs a set remixing the myth of the Trojan War. She plays recordings of battles, of her own recollections, of others’ testimonies, pulling from the archives of poets Stesichorus and H.D. An experimentation with the notion of a glitch—in the fabric of time, in poetry, and in electronic dance music—After High Definition investigates one woman’s story that is sampled, riffed on, and remixed such that it bears no resemblance to truth. In a world where women and trans people are losing their autonomy, where genocides are ubiquitous, and digital communication oversaturated with incoherence, After High Definition asks what is left when we lose the means of our own reproduction. An excerpt of this project was published online by Tenement Press and a rendition of the entire text will be produced by Resonance FM / Resonance Extra as a radio performance.
‘HELEN there’s a light, inside
the sound of nothing new / within its seam
in the paw of a severed rabbit’s foot
blood leaksss, scratchesss, coalesces a discooo
into shadows / extend from here to away
encroaching onto theatres older
than my name / bank accounts,
nope
n u m b e r s count themselves like ants
carrying a leaf from its roasting to the wedding
of a sister, don’t
know the codes
hidden
in the clicks of alphabet keys, carved into years
under stone’
Read the rest of the Tenement Press extract here.
Image: portrait taken by Alma Holovatuck.
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A Women’s Thing
‘Surrealism. It’s strange, it’s sleek, it’s erotic, it’s uneven. “It never made sense to me,” a friend said to me about two weeks ago over a glass of wine, “I just don’t understand, on an aesthetic level, the value of cutting up a body.”
A place between human and nonhuman, alive and unalive, where edges blur reality into more of a smokescreen, something certain but full of doubt. It’s been well-documented how warping binaries through paint was an instinctive reaction of artists responding to the traumatic aftereffects of World War I. The mind-blowing and sometimes mind-numbing images of wolves, queens, composite animals, chairs, hands bigger than faces, and faces being eaten by sphinxes, all make sense in that context. Seems so obvious, more than true when the notion of a “world order” is turned on its axis. Who’s to say lions can’t cast spells?’
Read the rest of this essay on the surrealist artist Maruja Mallo, here.
- Barbara Kruger (2025)
- Helen Frankenthaler (2025)
- Méret Oppenheim (2025)
- Maruja Mallo (2025)
- Hilma af Klint (2024)
- Leonor Fini (2024)
- Barbara Longhi (2024)
- Alice Neel (2024)
- Leonora Carrington (2023)
- Celia Paul (2023)
Image: photograph of the painting ‘Les Distractions de Dagobert‘ by Leonora Carrington
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~ the anthropology of the frame ~
a text / image newsletter on art, literature, architecture, voyeurism, and portals
‘An opening in the wall to admit air or light.
Literally, a “wind eye.”
An eye-door, a gaze, a perspective.
The Latin word for window is “fenestra.” It’s most easily located in the English word “defenestration,” the accusation often lobbed at Carl Andre for the death of the artist and performer Ana Mendieta. It refers to the action of throwing someone else out of a window. Notable Russian dissidents in opposition to Putin are also pronounced dead through this act, each by the Kremlin suspiciously described as an “accidental fall.”
Closed windows are an interruption of an action. Of air naturally in motion, a perceptible current from a particular direction to another—stopped by the partition of glass. Depending on the time of day, width of the glass, proximity to the earth, motion is more or less blocked from transferring from one space to another.
When opened, possibility itself seems to stretch out its arms, inviting in what might have existed already, to take its place within a frame.‘
Read the rest of the first entry of the Window Snaps newsletter here.
Images: photograph by Shelly & Serena, two of the contributors of the project.
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‘I am always drawn back to the idea of writing as drawing, or inscription—the surfaces being as important as the page—the page as just one moment in the life of a tree or trees, and to be a future compost of sorts, or dust.‘
Read the rest of the interview with poet, essayist, and candlemaker Lucy Mercer here.
Conversations in the company of:
- Jennifer Croft
- Jazmina Barrera
- Lucy Mercer
- Boris Dralyuk
- Patricio Ferrari
- Jen Calleja
- Jess Chandler & Dominic James Jaeckle
- Vareila Mairanga
- Renata Juncadella
- Fiona Mackintosh
- Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
- Juan Arabia
- Cy Citlallin
- Eponine Howarth
- Ellie New
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