Mickalene Thomas, a 2015 United States Artists Fellow, is a visual artist and filmmaker who has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally since 2003. Thomas’s first solo museum exhibitions were in 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, and it is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Seattle Art Museum, among many other institutions. Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago and Berlin; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. Thomas has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); the Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); the Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); the Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); and a Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); among others. Born in 1971 in New Jersey, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.