Michelle Oosterbaan

Michelle Oosterbaan is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Recently she held several residencies across Northern Europe including the Cite des Arts International in Paris. Oosterbaan’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that include The Drawing Center New York, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Delaware Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka. She is a Great Rivers Biennial winner (2008 St. Louis, MO) and published in FUKT, A Drawing Journal (2009, Berlin). She has also has received grants from Center for Emerging Arts (2014), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2004), and the Leeway Foundation (2001) among others. Oosterbaan was awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2004) and Yaddo (2005, 2003), as a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur fellow, in addition to invitations to VCCA, (2009, 2006). Her work investigates signs and symbols of time and spirit and the theatre of space and color.

She earned a BFA from Washington University as a Fred Conway Scholar in painting/printmaking and an MFA from Indiana University and studied painting at SACI at Cleveland Institute of Art in Florence Italy. Last summer, she collaborated with Mural Arts Philadelphia to design and install a site-specific color-based mural in Germantown titled Kalpavriksha: The Tree of Life. She is returning to Philadelphia after teaching painting and drawing at Bowdoin College and Bucknell University as a visiting professor.