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Michaela Rife

Michaela Rife is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she teaches courses in American art and environmental art history. She is currently at work on her first book project, Dust Bowl Murals: Settler Colonialism, Environmental Crisis, and Public Art on the New Deal Plains.

Stories from this author

Watercolor image of mountain scene with a cloudless blue sky, trees and boulders in the foreground, and the artist’s stamp in the bottom left-hand corner.

Chiura Obata's American Landscape Art

The Chiura Obata Papers were the source for an assignment created in the Archives of American Art's Teaching with Primary Sources workshop

Ernest Lawson's Gold Mining, Cripple Creek

Art Bites: Gold Mining, Cripple Creek

Art Bites is a new series on Eye Level based on lunchtime talks at the museum. They feature the voices of SAAM's research fellows who share their discoveries about artworks from the collection. Michaela Rife was the 2017-2018 Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow at SAAM, where she researched the environmental history of New Deal murals on the American Great Plains. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto and is currently working on her dissertation as a Tyson Scholar of American Art at Crystal Bridges.