Michelle Westmark Wingard

Michelle Westmark Wingard is an installation-based photographer, curator, and arts educator. She is Professor of Art and Gallery Director of Bethel University’s two exhibition spaces. In her seventeen years of programming exhibitions, Wingard has worked with 100+ artists in a diverse range of media. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 program cycles, Wingard was honored to serve as a Curatorial Mentor for the Emerging Curators Institute (ECI). Her photographic and curatorial projects often seek to create experiential and participatory opportunities exploring themes of memory, grief, memorial, perception, and interconnection. Wingard thinks about all aspects of her work as gestures of care. She has curated several exhibitions and has also exhibited her own photographic work locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the Jerome Travel Grant (2015) and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017 and 2019). Wingard holds an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (2006). She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.