We are delighted to announce the appointment of Michelle Jackson-Beckett as Curator of Avery Drawings & Archives. Michelle received her Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center in May of 2022. Her dissertation entitled “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1938” examines critical challenges to western European paradigms of modern architecture and interiors, focusing especially on reconsiderations of historicism and “universal” aesthetics in future-oriented examples of modern domestic interiors in Vienna. Michelle has extensive teaching experience ranging from seminars exploring accessibility in design to surveys of Post-modern art, architecture and design. She also has a number of publications to her credit including chapters exploring gender and interiors in modernist Vienna for forthcoming edited volumes. Her first monograph, Vienna and the New Wohnkultur 1918-1938, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Prior to joining Avery, Michelle was the archivist for the Victor J. Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she was also a senior lecturer in the Design History & Theory Department. She has had wide-ranging professional experience in the academic, museum and gallery worlds. From 2017-2020, she served as Director of Archives & Publications at R & Company design gallery and has also worked for the Neue Galerie and Sotheby’s auction house.

Welcome Michelle! We look forward to many fruitful collaborations across the libraries and with the faculty and students of the Department of Art History & Archaeology and Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.