Michael Ann Holly is Starr Director Emerita of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute (Director from 1999-2016) and professor of art history in the graduate program at Williams College. Co-founder (with Mieke Bal) of the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, she was also Chair of the Art and Art History Department there for thirteen years. In addition to many essays on the history of art, Holly is the author of several books on the subjects of the historiography and critical theory in the history of art - Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Cornell, 1984), Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Cornell, 1996), The Melancholy Art (Princeton 2013) and co-editor of Visual Theory (ed. with Norman Bryson and K. Moxey, HarperCollins,1991), Visual Culture (ed. with Bryson and Moxey, New England Press, 1994), The Subjects of Art History (ed. with Mark Cheetham and Moxey, Cambridge, 1998), Aesthetics and Visual Studies (ed. with Moxey, Yale, 2002), and What is Research in the Visual Arts?(ed. with M. Smith, Yale, 2008). She has received many grants, including a Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Humanities fellowships, a Mellon fellowship, a CASVA senior fellowship, a Getty Senior Fellowship (twice), among several others. She has served as book editor of the Art Bulletin and is a trustee emerita of the National Humanities Center. Her most recent published essay appears in the Jasper Johns, Mind/Mirror retrospective catalogue, ed. Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf (Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art (New Haven, 2022).
