(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 short story about Charlotte Salomon here.
Read my essay about my time researching Charlotte Salomon in Amsterdam and my subsequent conversation with archivist Alexia Marmara here.
Image below: a gouache from Charlotte Salomon’s tour de force in paint and text, Leben? oder Theater? (1940-42).
(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.
Images: photograph of Leonor Fini taken at her studio; portrait below (oil on canvas) is of Alida Valli II & was painted by Fini in 1948.
Read the latest issue, QUEER NIGHTLIFE: A Collection of Moves, Sounds, and Other Sensations, here.
(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 this book published by Oxford University Press here.
- A novel on the Argentinian dictatorship, intended as an audiobook for Audible.
- An essay on queer dance traditions in Jamaica.
- A memoir by an antitrust lawyer about his life’s work.
micaelabrinsley@gmail.com
@mic_brinsley
Micaela’s debut chapbook on lesbian desire and Violette Leduc, “Forward,” was recently published by Berlin-based independent publisher, Cutt Press. Her prose can be found in Another Gaze, Tenement Press, Asymptote, Tique, Horizon Magazine, and Minor Literature[s]. She is also a contributing essayist for the journal A Women’s Thing, where she writes essays about portraiture and the surrealist period. She is an assistant editor for TDR: The Drama Review, the leading academic journal on performance and the avant-garde, and serves as the co-editor-in-chief of La Piccioletta Barca, an international arts and literary magazine.
She currently splits her time between Buenos Aires and New York City.
.
CONTACT ME HERE
Micaela Brinsley’s [...] such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while. (Asymptote Journal)
- Developmental Editing // Copyediting
- Archival Research
- Commissions on prose about theater, portraiture, surrealist artists, experimental literature, queer 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
Tisch School of the Arts
B.A. in Performance Studies
summa cum laude
(2020)
Thesis: In Search of Home, reviews of performances in exile
(an analysis of performances by exiled queer artists from the Asian and Latin American diasporas)
Cutt Press
2025
‘Beyond the Radius’ (essay)
Deleuzine
2026
(upcoming)
‘In Search of a Jewel: Reckoning with the Memory of the Argentinian Dictatorship’ (essay)
Robida
2026
(upcoming)
‘Up a Flight to Somewhere Else’ (prose)
OCEAN POUNDS
2026
*
‘Doubt as a Pathway’ (prose)
Amurmur
2026
‘Mercedes Pinto’s “Divorce as a Sanitary Measure”’ (essay & co-translation)
Another Gaze
2026
‘What to do when so much is lost’ (prose)
Bleet! zine
2025
‘In Suspension of the Before To After’ (essay & interview)
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
2026
‘Dorothea Tanning and the Art of Becoming: Doors into the Present’
2026
‘Grete Stern: Behind the Eye of the Camera’
2025
‘Naudline Pierre: On Rendering an Ephemeral Self’
2025
‘Barbara Kruger: The Context of Text’
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)
Micaela Brinsley, met by chance through an email posting, brought the project to the finish line with expert editorial support, curiosity, and an ever-present smile and encouragement. (Thomas F. DeFrantz)