Michelle's work explores feminine power, beauty, and human presence as elemental forces. She began her formal training at age 11 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, later earning her MFA there after completing a BA in Visual Communications from the Colorado Institute of Art.

Raised in Chicago as the daughter of immigrants and shaped by the cultural richness of Ukrainian Village, Michelle has long understood art as both refuge and revelation. She paints to uncover what lives beneath the surface — to translate gesture, energy, and emotional undercurrents into form. For her, painting is a space of freedom and inquiry: a way to process lived experience and to reconnect with something instinctual, embodied, and deeply human.

Beauty operates in her work as an intentional threshold. It draws the viewer in — lush color, confident form, a compelling gaze — before unfolding into deeper questions about visibility, power, and selfhood. Rather than decorative, beauty becomes a strategy: a portal into the layered realities of the feminine experience. Her figures are not portraits but archetypes of resilience, sensuality, vulnerability, and strength. They hold presence. They ask for presence in return.

Connection to the natural world is embedded in her process and imagery. Working primarily in oil on linen and wood, Michelle builds tactile, physical surfaces where paint moves with a sense of weather, terrain, and growth. The figures in her work are not passive subjects, feminine force is rendered as intuitive, and elemental: at once nurturing and formidable, grounded and expansive.

Michelle's paintings have been exhibited nationally and featured by NBC News, the Sundance Film Festival, South X Southwest, Google Intersection, Burning Man and ChefDance, and are held in private and corporate collections. Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she continues to create work that affirms art as a site of connection between body and spirit, individual and collective, with an unapologetic female perspective.