(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
[More..]
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